Students who attended an early-college high school were more likely than their peers to earn a high school diploma and later a college degree, according to a new randomized longitudinal study of 10 schools in the Gates Early-College High School Initiative.
The initiative—launched in 2002 by the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which also supports coverage of the education industry and K-12 innovation at Education Week—assists dual-enrollment schools targeted to students from backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in college. Independent researchers tracked students who applied by lottery to an early-college high school from 2005-06 to 2007-08 and compared the academic track records of the 1,044 students who got into the schools versus the 1,414 who didn’t.
While there were no significant differences between the groups in grade average or math achievement, the early-college students were 5 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than the comparison group 86 percent versus 81 percent.
