Action Strategies
2. Create the Maine Early College Initiative to encourage students to continue their education beyond high school.
The Goal: Ensure that every Maine high school offers an early college program to its students, allowing as many Maine students as possible to experience academic success at the collegiate level before graduating from high school - regardless of their academic records or postsecondary education plans. Currently, roughly 18% of Maine students do college-level work while still in high school. We will boost that number to 70% in the next ten years.
The Challenge: Too many Maine students see college as beyond their reach. This is especially true of young people who are the first in their family to consider postsecondary education. Not only are these students unfamiliar with the whole culture of preparing for college (taking SAT's, filling out college applications and financial aid forms, identifying sources of aid, visiting campuses and so on), they often do not have an academic foundation in high school that will ensure a smooth and successful transition to college.
Students who leave high school with some meaningful exposure to college are less likely to see higher education as abstract and unattainable. With most so-called "early college" initiatives, however, the focus has been on students who are headed to higher education anyway. This approach misses the critical opportunity to leverage change by increasing opportunities to access college-level work for students who are not planning to go on to college.
The Strategy: The Compact proposes a Maine Early College Initiative in which every Maine high school develops a program offering students a spectrum of early college experiences. Several promising early college models currently exist. This strategy seeks to expand those models and, ultimately, support their availability statewide.
Early college programs developed by Maine high schools will provide multiple points of entry to meet the needs of a wide variety of students. Importantly, students whose parents did not go to college and those who are not actively considering college for themselves will have opportunities to take at least one college-level course for credit while in high school.
These early college experiences range from a single course or seminar offered at a local community college or university to opportunities to graduate from high school with significant college credit--in some cases, a full year of credit or even an associate degree. Offerings of Advanced Placement (AP) courses to high school students will be dramatically expanded, within schools as well as online and through distance learning. Additionally, a broader range of students will be encouraged to enroll in AP courses, and schools will provide support to help students take on more challenging work.
Most importantly, the Maine Early College Initiative gives students who are not planning to go to college the opportunity to experience, first-hand, the academic rigor of college in a campus setting and to begin seeing themselves as successful college students.
The intended result is that every student graduates high school with a level of literacy that allows them to choose to attend college or not. And we believe that this early college initiative will leverage the kind of change in college-going rates that Maine needs.
The Maine Early College Initiative is designed to create more entry points to college-level learning, and to provide the support necessary to ensure student success when they take on that challenge. We anticipate that this initiative will not only significantly boost the rate of Maine students who go to college, but will also improve the chances of success among those students who do go to college.
The Partners: Maine colleges and universities (public and private; two-year and four-year) will broaden and deepen their outreach to area high schools and high school students. This means moving beyond the traditional relationship centered on recruiting students to a philosophical and operational commitment to support collaborative early college programs. Maine high schools work closely with their college partners to create programs that will serve a wide array of students. As we seek to strengthen Maine's education system on a PreK to 16 basis, guidance counselors play a critical role in supporting students who do not see college in their future.
The Maine Department of Education will work with the Mitchell Institute to address various policy implications of these new programs, supporting necessary action by the state Board of Education and the Maine Legislature. And the Mitchell Institute will take the lead in shaping and supporting the early college programs as they are developed, while also undertaking the study and research of the impact of these programs on the students they serve.
Related Strategies: The Maine Early College Initiative should be viewed as part of an imperative to strengthen Maine's high schools and to ensure that every Maine student graduates prepared for success in college. This requires that structures and practices are in place to meet these goals, including continued support and expansion of Maine's Learning Results and strong school guidance and counseling services.
Other efforts create what educators call "seamless transitions" between high school and college. Strategies include aligning courses and curricula so that every student who graduates from high school has taken all the courses expected of her as an entering college freshman, and coordinating high school exit exams and college entrance exams so that high school and college standards and expectations mesh. Other potential strategies include using personal learning plans to create long-term goals and having all high school seniors apply for college and financial aid.
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