College in the High School soars in popularity across WA

DES MOINES — Tyee High School math teacher Steve McCord warms up his early morning precalculus class on a Tuesday with a let’s-all-try-this exercise on finding inverse functions.

About a dozen students are scattered around the portable classroom, most working together in groups of two. McCord, who is endlessly patient and encouraging, gets all eyes to swivel to the front of the room: “What do we do first?” he asks, pointing to the math problem on the screen.

“Take away the -32 on both sides,” one student offers.

“Love it,” says McCord. He slashes through -32 on each side of the equation. “What do we do next?”

Another student pipes up. “Divide by nine,” she says.

 “Good, good, good, good,” he says, beaming.

McCord is teaching his high school students the same course taught at the University of Washington — Math 120 — over the entire school year rather than the fast-paced 10 weeks of a college quarter. 

The kids who pass his class will earn five credits on a UW transcript, and they’ll also earn credit toward high school graduation. If they go on to a two- or four-year college, the course will help satisfy college-level math requirements. If they don’t, they can check off the box that says “some college” on a job application and may have a leg up with employers looking for workers with strong math skills — especially sought-after in skilled-trade jobs. 

Over the past seven years, College in the High School has grown exponentially, reaching more than 30,000 Washington students in 2023 — double the number who took the classes six years earlier. In fall 2024, more than 44,000 registered for a CiHS class. It is more popular than Running Start, a mainstay of dual-enrollment programs typically taught at the state’s community colleges. In 2023, it was nearly as popular in Washington as Advanced Placement. It’s reaching students in every part of the state, from the coast to the Idaho border.

And CiHS is poised to grow. Before 2023, students had to pay $300 or more for a five-credit class. That’s a relative bargain for a college course; most students take three classes a quarter at UW Seattle, where tuition is $4,324 a quarter for state residents. 

But many families balked at the fee. In 2023, legislators unanimously passed a new state law that made College in the High School free for students in public high schools. (Many private schools also offer College in the High School, but the legislation didn’t remove those fees.)

“I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and the cost factor has always been the biggest barrier,” said Tim Stetter, who directs the University of Washington’s program.

Since the law passed, statewide enrollment in CiHS has grown by 46%.

Offering the classes for free “is a game-changer for us,” said McCord, who teaches two other UW classes at Tyee, Astronomy 101 and Astronomy 150. About 10% of Tyee students took a CiHS course last year.

UW in the High School was Washington’s first program, started in 1981 to help gifted kids who were chafing at high school’s academic limitations and ready to do college work, Stetter said. In recent years, it’s expanded to give students in the academic middle a chance to earn those credits, too.

How it’s taught

McCord received training, mentorship and curriculum materials from the UW that allowed him to mirror the UW’s offerings. Most of Washington’s public four-year colleges and some community colleges offer College in the High School training. 

Earning college credit in high school is not new — students have been able to take classes at community colleges through the state’s Running Start program for decades. Hundreds of Washington schools offer Advanced Placement, a national program; more than two dozen offer the International Baccalaureate program, and a handful offer Cambridge International, all of which can lead to college credit.

But College in the High School has built-in advantages. Students don’t have to leave high school for a class at a community college, as they do with Running Start. For COVID-era students who missed out on in-person school for a chunk of their lives, that’s a big plus: They stay with their peers and don’t have to worry about transportation to another campus.

And unlike AP, IB and Cambridge, earning credit doesn’t depend on doing well on a high-stakes exam at the end of the year. Students get regular grades and have a good sense of how they’re doing as they go along.

McCord looked into teaching AP physics, but he thought the course seemed too much like teaching to the test. “I’m not a big fan,” he said. Instead, he teaches precalculus, or Math 120 in the UW course catalog, which shows how students can apply algebra in real-world examples.

The state publishes a chart showing what type of credit each CiHS course receives at each of the state’s five public universities and one public college (The Evergreen State College).

At Wapato High School in the Yakima Valley, English teacher Kirsten Anderson taught an AP English course for several years, but to get credit “it’s all one test, on one day, and my kids weren’t doing well,” she said. Typically, only one of her students each year would earn a score of 4 out of 5, which many colleges require. And the credit would often be recorded on a transcript as an elective, so her students would still have to take English in college.

According to AP, about 72% of Washington students scored a 3 or higher on an exam in 2024. CiHS’s pass rates are even better — in 2023, 96% of students who took a CiHS class earned high school credit, but only about a third earned college credit because they didn’t pay the $300-or-more college fee, said Melissa Beard, director of legislative affairs for the Washington Council of Presidents.

Now, about 10 of Anderson’s students earn college credit in English 131 every year, a composition class that emphasizes reading a wide range of materials and writing for different audiences. She also teaches English 111, a rhetoric and composition class.

“It’s a great opportunity to expose our students to college rigor, and helps a lot of them see that they can be successful at the college level,” said Wapato Principal David Blakney. “They see that they are a smart kid, and they can do college-level classes.” This year, about 100 juniors and seniors at Wapato High are taking a CiHS course.

Wapato senior Amanda Garcia, cheerleader and president of her student body, picked CiHS over Running Start because she didn’t want to leave campus for classes at Yakima Valley College, a 20-minute drive away. In addition to the transportation expense, Running Start students must also buy their college textbooks, and the classes are limited to juniors and seniors. CiHS is open to 9th-12th graders.

English 131 was challenging for Garcia.

“It was very difficult at first, writing essay after essay,” Garcia said. “I wasn’t used to the speed of things.”

But as she settled into the pace, she grew more confident. When she graduates, she’ll have earned 20 credits in all — two English classes, a psychology course and statistics. She’s been accepted to Eastern Washington University and plans to become a speech pathologist.

Many states offer some version of college classes taught in high school. The programs are accredited by the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, which provides quality control; Stetter is a former president and a current accreditation commissioner.

In Washington, high school teachers who want to teach a CiHS course must have the credentials to teach at the college level and be approved by the college’s faculty. They use the college’s assessments and follow the textbook, software and learning objectives.

That may become a limiting factor for CiHS’s growth, said Beard, since not all high school teachers will qualify. Beard authored the report to the Legislature on CiHS’s progress.

CiHS in Washington is defined as high school teachers teaching a college class on the high school campus. “There’s a lot of local control,” said Jamie Traugott, director of student services and K-12 alignment with the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.

Running Start offers a broader range of classes and also offers dual credit. But students say they like taking college-level work at their high schools, from a teacher they already know. 

“It’s a safer space to try it out,” Traugott said.

In February, the national College in the High School Alliance tapped Washington to develop and implement policy plans to lead dual-enrollment policy nationwide. The state board will oversee the work.

State lags in college-going

Getting more kids to consider education beyond high school is a state priority. For decades, Washington has struggled to get high-school graduates to attend two- or four-year colleges. The numbers improved slightly in the 2010s, and by 2019, about 59% of graduates had enrolled in postsecondary education in the first year after high school graduation, according to the state Education Research & Data Center.

But the pandemic upended the college-going numbers here and across the country. In 2022 — the most recent year for which numbers are available — the percentage of state students who enrolled in college after graduation dropped to 52%.

The numbers looked better for kids enrolled in CiHS. For the graduating class of 2022, about 56% of those who took a CiHS class enrolled in an institution of higher education. Last year, both CiHS and Running Start enrollment ticked upward, including gains for historically underserved students of color, according to the state board.

Victoria Terry, the principal at Tyee High, says College in the High School helps more students see that college or training after high school is within their grasp. “They don’t know what’s possible until they’re exposed to it,” she said.

Reaching more first-generation and lower-income kids is the goal. Studies show that a student who earns a college credit in high school is more likely to enroll in college — it proves to them they’re capable of tackling more challenging classes, and it cuts the price of earning a degree since they enter with college credits under their belt.

Statewide in 2021-22, about 48% of the kids taking College in the High School were low-income. A year later, the numbers ticked up slightly to about 50%, according to Beard’s legislative report. 

“I’m a believer that any student can do college-level work,” Beard said.

Giving all students access — not just honors students or kids destined for college — can help drive home that point. 

“They may not see themselves as college potential,” Beard said, “and end up doing well.”