Dual Enrollment Pathways

A primary goal of the High School Dual Enrollment Program is to align course selection with major and career goals.  The pathways are designed to provide students, especially first-generation students and students from underserved populations, as well as their high school counselors, strong introductory course options that are program-specific and career-oriented.

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[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: Getting a college degree is critical for success in today's job market. But not enough students are completing them, especially low-income students and students of color. I recently visited Chaffey College in California to see how they're helping students stay on a path to a degree and into the workforce so they can realize their dreams. LAURA HOPE: Higher education has been doing a lot of the same things for 700 years. The very robes that we wear to commencement are meant to support us in drafty castles that we don't inhabit anymore. We have to be more future minded, more responsive, more nimble to provide the community with what it needs. Students struggle with not knowing what it is they're going to do. We wanted to simplify that experience. Rather than asking an 18-year-old what is it you want to do with yourself, we started to build a community around their interest clusters. So if they're interested in health, they're going to need guided exploration rather than bouncing around in a series of courses that may not help them formulate a future goal. Dual enrollment has been a way for high school students to earn college credit while they're also attending high school. We want to open up community college access to students who don't see themselves yet as college material. Even taking one or two courses can help to illuminate their strengths and their interest to pursue a bigger goal than they might have pursued otherwise. MATTHEW CABRERA: Along with being a freshman, I'm a college student at Chaffey taking college courses along with my high school classwork. I've known about college, but I've never really understood the pathway to get into that college. Joining this program provides a clear path, clear steps, clear guidance to college. LAURA HOPE: Chaffey made the determination to become a leader in cybersecurity as a major. And our students can identify that as a pathway while they're still in high school, start to take some courses, develop some foundational skills. SPEAKER 2: So this is our cybersecurity center. And so what the students have to do is they get to set up everything that an organization might need, switching, routing, firewalls, services, virtual systems. LAURA HOPE: Most of our students get jobs before they're even finished because the demand is so high. In California alone, cyber has over 400,000 job opportunities. SPEAKER 2: It's great that they have such hands-on experience available. If you get kids thinking, OK, here's what I'd have to do, is that a fit for me, then you can create a lot of clarity, which shortens the distance to get to the job.

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Learn more about Bill Gates' visit to Chaffey's Cyber Security Dual Enrollment Pathway! See GatesNotes: A Map from Classroom to Career