Longitudinal Findings From the Early College High School Initiative Impact Study

Abstract

This study is a randomized controlled trial that assessed the impact of Early College High Schools on students' high school graduation, college enrollment, and college degree attainment, as well as students' high school experiences using extant data and survey data. The study included 10 Early Colleges that enrolled students in Grades 9 to 12 in 2005 through 2011 and used a lottery for admissions, and 2,458 students who participated in those admission lotteries. The study time frame covered Grade 9 through 2 years post high school for all students and 4 years post high school for the oldest student cohort. It found that Early Colleges had positive impacts on college enrollment and college completion as well as students' high school experiences.

Radically Early College Entrants on Radically Early College Entrance: A Heuristic Inquiry

“…The first research question of this paper was quite broad, and encompassed both more traditional aspects of early college research (such as academic achievement) and the affective and qualitative aspects that have been largely overlooked in previous research (such as the actual description of the experience by early college entrants). Aligning with previous positive findings about academic success among early college students (Haxton et al, 2016;Locke et al, 2014;Schumacker et al, 1995), our participants reported positive academic experiences and strong academic performance. Dai et al's (2015) participants seemed to find early college entrance academically challenging with a somewhat difficult transition into a new culture and harder material.…”

“…Early college high schools serve a special purpose for low-income and other traditionally underserved students by offering tuition-free college credits (Berger et al, 2010;Haxton et al, 2016;. These students fare much better in early college high schools than they do in traditional education, with degree attainment for underserved early college students sometimes reaching ten times that of underserved unaccelerated high school students (Haxton et al, 2016).…”

“…The majority of work on early college is quantitative (Berger et al, 2010;Edmunds et al, 2010;Edmunds et al, 2012;Fischetti et al, 2011;Haxton et al, 2016;Janos et al, 1989;Oliver et al, 2010;Schumacker et al, 1995;Sethna et al, 2001;Shepard et al, 2009), though there is some qualitative work on early college as well Locke et al, 2014;Noble et al, 1999;Woodcock & Olson, 2013). With the goals of quantitative research being mainly generalizability and broadness (Polit & Beck, 2010), this implies a limited focus on lived experiences as explored by qualitative research.…”

“…However, a consistent pattern emerged among early college high school studies concerning teacher relationships, which helped to prevent academic issues. Students in early college high schools reported that their teachers were highly supportive (Edmunds et al, 2010;Haxton et al, 2016) and held them to high standards (Edmunds et al, 2012;. One exception to this was Woodcock and Olson's 2013 study, in which three participants were asked to list what factors played a critical role in their success: not one of them cited any adult.…”

Early college high school achievement outcomes in North Carolina: End of grade and ACT performance

“…Garet, Knudson, and Hoshen, (2014) report that students attending EC as compared to their peers 1) have a greater opportunity to attend and graduate college, 2) had a superior academic trajectory in terms of earning a college degree; 3) had smaller achievement gaps between economic different students, and 4) their appeared to be long term benefits beyond the high school years for EC students. A series of papers from several authors (Edmunds, 2016;Edmunds et al, 2016;Haxton et al, 2016;Unlu, Edmunds, Fesler, & Glennie, 2015) found that EC students performed better as compared to similar students. These studies are grouped together as they all used similar data from North Carolina EC schools that utilized a lottery admission process and thus argued random selection existed allowing for causal arguments to be defended.…”