Student Dual Enrollment Programs Boosted By Legislative Support

A pilot program to help high school students earn college credit is starting to pay dividends after just one year. 

The West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission (HEPC) announced at its meeting Friday an 11.5 percent increase in high school dual enrollment programs, which allow students to earn college credit while still in high school. 

In 2023, House Bill 2005 created and funded LevelUpWV, a four year dual enrollment pilot program that commission members credited with spurring the large jump.  

Zornitsa Georgieva, senior director of research for the commission, said the increase in program engagement at individual institutions has been significant.

“Some of those are pretty high,” she said. “We have 42 percent at Fairmont State. We have 64 percent in Marshall University, 38.5 percent at Concord University. So we are seeing those increases.”

With less than half of all West Virginia high school graduates pursuing post-secondary education, commission members hope dual enrollment will help boost the state’s college going rate. The college going rate is defined as the percentage of public high school students who enrolled in a college, university or career technical/vocational school following graduation.

Sarah Tucker, West Virginia’s Chancellor of Higher Education, announced the creation of an interagency college going work group with the West Virginia Department of Education, focused on increasing the state’s college going rate.

“We’re really trying to work together to figure out how to get that college going rate up in our state,” Tucker said. “We know it’s 47 percent and that’s simply not good enough for any of us.”

Georgieva also reported that enrollment of first time freshmen was down more than 3 percent year to year, a change that Tucker said was in part due to issues with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, last year. 

The FAFSA unlocks both federal and state financial aid for students. The federal government released a shortened FAFSA at the end of 2023 that was intended to simplify the financial aid process for students, but the rollout of the new form was plagued with delays and technical issues.

“The FAFSA debacle really contributed to what happened this fall, obviously not for international students, but for our first time freshmen the national drops are almost 6 percent,” Tucker said. “Enrollment for first time freshmen nationally had been trending up for a number of years, and this year, suddenly, it tanked, and that is attributed to what happened with the FAFSA.”