High school students get early college degrees

By Gracie Bonds Staples

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The notion is enough to make someone like Kelsey Biernath giddy.

After years of taking college courses that merely counted toward a degree, Brenau Academy seniors can now earn a college degree along with their high school diploma.

“It’s amazing, an incredible opportunity,” Biernath, a 15-year-old from Tucker, said earlier this week. “Hopefully it will help increase my chances of getting into a good college.”

Whether Biernath gets into the college of her choice or not, early college programs that allow high school students to earn associate degrees like this one are part of a trend that has become increasingly popular since 2002.

Starting this fall, Brenau Academy students who enroll by tenth grade will be able to graduate with both a high school diploma and enough credits to qualify for a two-year college degree from nearby Brenau University. Administrators believe the program may be the first private school-to-private college partnership of its kind.

Instead of taking Advanced Placement classes and tests that could result in a student’s skipping lower-level pre-requisite courses, Brenau Academy students routinely take college courses that will count toward degrees. About 40 percent of current students are enrolled in at least one college-level course.

“We don’t have AP or Honors classes because we don’t need them,” said Tim Daniel, the Academy’s headmaster. “We have something better — real college classes taught by real college professors surrounded by real college students.”

Although most high schools offer accelerated classes, they tend to attract high achievers and students like Biernath.

Kelsey’s father, Mark Biernath, said he likes the idea that his daughter will have an associate degree if she completes the program. If she doesn’t, that she will have enough credits to start college as a junior.

In addition, Biernath said, “If she has an associate degree, colleges may be viewing her as more a transfer student than an entering freshman.”

In these tough economic times, Daniel said, early college programs have great appeal to both parents and students for the financial advantages.

Beyond providing a shortcut through the high school-college transition, the program could save students thousands of dollars in tuition. That is exactly what happened with Joan Coles, who last year was valedictorian at the Gainesville Academy.

Coles had enough credits to enter Marlboro College in Vermont as a second-semester junior, essentially shaving more than two years off her college career. A similar track seems to be destined for Katie Dugan, a 16-year-old Brenau Academy junior from Cumming. Her goal is to have enough college credits when she graduates next year to transfer into an upper-level pre-professional program at Brown University.

Daniel said that he decided to offer the early college program at Brenau Academy after researching partnerships between North Carolina’s Guilford College and the Guilford County public school system and between Bard College and the New York City schools.

“As I looked at these different models, it hit me that Brenau had been doing this for years without the formal structure,” said Daniel. “We decided to take it another step and adopted an associates degree that would become available to academy students and we’re launching that this year.”

Early college high schools first opened in metro Atlanta in 2005, after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the University System of Georgia’s Preschool through College Department a $2-million, five-year grant. The Robert W. Woodruff Foundation provided an additional $2 million in matching funds.

Today there are some 200 early college high schools in the country. Of those, 12 are located in Georgia, including Atlanta’s Carver Early College High School, which graduated its first class in May.

Carver is one of two Atlanta Public School — Washington Early College is the other — partnering with the University System of Georgia to target low-income minority students, those for whom English is a second language and those who are the first in their family to attend college.

“Our schools are doing excellent,” said Dawn Cooper, director of college readiness for the Georgia Early College Initiative. “They provide a rigorous course of study, high expectations and personalized learning.”

All of Carver’s 79 students graduated this spring, Cooper said, some earning as many as 52 hours of transferable college credit.

Dana Tofig, spokesman for the Georgia Department of Education, said the state is “seeing a lot of steady growth in early college programs and that’s a good thing.”

For instance, he said, 1,998 public school students were enrolled in Early College last year, up more than 1,000 from 2007.