Funding Cutbacks Leave Some Early Colleges Struggling

Students Shantya Gibson, Jalyn Gilbert, and Alexis Heard work on a group project at the Dayton Early-College Academy in Dayton, Ohio. The school is seeking ways to stay afloat following a cut in state funding for early colleges.

—James D. DeCamp

Hard Times Fall as Studies Point to Programs' Promise

By Mary Ann Zehr

At a time when two large-scale experimental studies are showing promising outcomes for students who attend early-college high schools, some of those schools are struggling to cover costs or have even had to close for financial reasons.

The 214 early colleges that are part of a national network run by the Boston-based Jobs for the Future are having to be creative about financing since a $107 million investment in them by the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has mostly been spent and subsidies for them in some states have been cut. The school improvement model enables students to take college courses while still in high school, and many of the participants attain associate degrees by high school graduation.

Over the past two and a half years, two such schools have closed in Georgia, and a District of Columbia high school greatly scaled back its school-within-a-school early-college program. In Ohio, Youngstown State University is transferring responsibility for an early-college high school on its campus to the nearby Eastern Gateway Community College because it can no longer...