Why are we holding students back from success? In Iowa, all students, under the Senior Year Plus legislation, have the incredible opportunity to take college level courses in high school for free. This means that students can both explore classes that interest them, and possibly apply those credits to their post-secondary path—without ever having to pay a penny. Mount Vernon contracts with Kirkwood Community College to allow students this opportunity, but inexplicably only allows less than half of the available classes to be taken. And if a student wishes to take a class not available in the dual-enrollment portal, well, they’re expected to pay full tuition with fees, which is simply not feasible for many students. If we want to encourage student success we need to allow all Kirkwood course offerings to be taken in the dual enrollment portal.
In 2023, Kirkwood was reportedly able to save $8.2 Million in tuition fees from families across eastern Iowa. Many of the students taking advantage of this opportunity attend smaller or more rural schools like Mount Vernon, where many subjects that students might be interested in aren’t normally offered, and Kirkwood is their only chance to explore their post-secondary interests during high school. Kirkwood boasts an extremely impressive 1200+ course offerings across 107 subjects, from Accounting, to Pharmacy Tech, to even Wind Energy. Meaning almost any subject one may be interested in is probably offered at Kirkwood.
However, the dual-enrollment portal, which is where students must enroll in courses if they want state subsidization, has less than half of the courses that are offered in the normal portal. Meaning that many of the subjects and courses students are interested in taking simply aren’t available to them.
Classes at Kirkwood cost $217 per credit hour, meaning a normal three credit hour course costs $651 plus fees. But courses can easily reach into the thousands. For example, if a student wished to take Technical Mathematics I, which is a semester-long course, they would be billed $1,008 for that course. And considering many students take multiple dual-enrollment courses a year they could be looking at a bill well into the thousands of dollars.
And with student loan debt being an issue that almost all Americans face, allowing students to choose the classes they are most interested in, or would apply the best after high school would help to relieve some of the debt off of students.
The only barrier for the school in allowing all courses to be taken by students is a single checkbox on a form filled out by the school board at the start of each school year. And I do not see any reason why some courses are available and some not.
I had thought the discrepancy between available courses in the dual-enrollment portal and the standard portal was due to many classes having a long list of prerequisites. However, this cannot be the case, because many capstone courses are available in the dual enrollment portal which have at least six prerequisite courses. And courses such as Technical Mathematics II are available, while Technical Mathematics I is not.
If the school wants to see students reach the highest level of success possible they need to opt in and allow all Kirkwood courses to be taken. This would be done at no additional cost to the school except for the additional tuition fees, and if we consider the long term success of our entire student body to be worth more than an additional few thousand dollars a year then it becomes more than worth it to make this change.
