High school students at Academy of Science and Entrepreneurship in Bloomington can now get a head start on college through a new partnership with Ivy Tech.
The College Core program allows high schoolers to earn 30 college credits — the equivalent of a freshman year of coursework.
Indiana University freshman Emily Silvas earned almost 75 credits with her high school’s college core partnership with Ivy Tech in Michigan City – making her a college junior on her first day of school.
She said that earning the college core in high school made a college degree feel possible.
“It took this huge idea of college that is very intimidating, and made it feel more achievable, especially with a college program; you don't have to be Einstein to do it,” Silvas said. “I am not the best student. I'm not very good at math. I hate really long essays. But it was a totally achievable goal.”
The earned credit has given her the freedom to explore other subject areas, instead of working only on requirements.
“I'm easing out my semesters; I'm taking classes that I'm simply interested in, which is really a privilege to be able to nurture my interest rather than just go straight for everything that's in my degree map,” Silvas said. “Like, I might do scuba diving next semester, who knows?”
Because of the credit that she earned in high school, Silvas is eligible to graduate in half of the normal time – saving her family a lot of money.
Academy Principal Angie Evans says that she hopes offering the college core through her school can help other students like Silvas save money.
“With the student loan debt crisis that's been in the media recently, we all know how expensive college can be and how detrimental those loans can be to people,” Evans said. “So, us being able to provide our students a jumpstart and a free jumpstart on their college education is just huge for our families.”
Michelle Ashcraft is the Indiana Commission for Higher Education Associate Commissioner for K- 12 strategy. She said the free programs can relieve a lot of the burden of paying for college.
“The average kind of full sticker price of going a year at a public institution is about $22,000. And in many cases, the courses that are being offered for the Indiana College Core are either being offered for free or for very low cost,” Ashcraft said.
Indiana College Readiness Report estimates that the low-cost course options for students have saved more than 10,000 college-going seniors more than $225 million.
In the last year, school participation in the College Core has increased by 67 percent, but the Indiana Commission for Higher Education wants to reach the rest of Indiana high schools in the next three years.
“We have a lot of schools that were really close to offering that 30 credit bloc, and that's primarily those who came on here in this last year,” Ashcraft said. “Now, we're asking how can we expand it to all of this other high schools as well.”
Teachers must meet accreditation standards to be able to teach dual enrollment courses.
Ashcraft said those requirements are one of the biggest barriers to expanding statewide to the rest of the 541 schools.
“One of the things that we need to address beyond just offering that credentialing for free is how might we be able to further incentivize the credentialing of teachers, they're giving up their time to be able to do that,” she said.
One of the strategies that schools are using is teacher sharing.
“If two or three schools are close enough together, especially if we think about online access to courses, are there ways that a couple are a small subset of schools might be able to work together to help share educators and share classes to be able to get students access to that credit?” Ashcraft said.
Ivy Tech Director of K-12 Initiatives Joe Hughbanks says he already has seen a few schools band together to share an accredited teacher among a couple neighboring schools.
The Academy is the ninth school in Ivy Tech Bloomington’s service area to join early college.
Hughbanks says that several other schools in the area may roll out the program for their student, too.
“We're going to see an explosion of teacher sharing to some extent, there's already this kind of thing going on in a couple– two or three schools in my service area,” Hughbanks said. “There are several schools at this point that are either have just signed or are about to sign within the coming year. And so that would push us up closer to about 12.”
Other early college high schools in the area that already offer the College Core through Ivy Tech include Bloomfield, Bloomington High School North, Eastern Greene, Loogootee, Martinsville, Mitchell, Paoli, and West Washington.
