Dual enrollment is one of those much-touted improvements in American education. The idea is that high-school students can take some community-college courses for credit, thus getting a supposed head start on college. Sounds good, but how well does it work?

In today’s Martin Center article, a high-school student in North Carolina, Celeste Summers, gives us her views on dual enrollment. She is not impressed with the system, which seems to do more for the community colleges (which get state dollars for the high-school students) than for the students themselves.

Among the problems she sees is a lack of academic rigor. She writes:

In Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, for example, many classes have a reputation for being easy. A ‘public’-speaking class in the Forsyth Tech curriculum asks students to record themselves and recite speeches for only the teacher to view. Forsyth County recently established that a student must take three introductory English courses through a local community college to satisfy the requirement for one high-school English credit. This means, in effect, that my county has concluded that the difficulty of three dual-enrollment college classes equates to that of one high-school class.

Thomas Sowell once wrote that public education in the U.S. is mostly a good jobs program for the teachers and administrators, with the welfare of the students being a weak secondary concern. Looks as if dual-enrollment programs are another instance of that.