Colere Microschool’s Position on Dual Enrollment
As Colere prepares to open its high school in Fall 2026, families have understandably begun to ask about dual enrollment, the practice of taking college courses while still in secondary school. The question sits at the intersection of academic ambition, developmental readiness, and the longer formation of a young person, and Colere takes it seriously on each of those grounds. This brief offers our position together with the research that informs it.
What the Research Shows
The empirical case for dual enrollment is more measured than its popularity suggests. The Institute of Education Sciences’ What Works Clearinghouse, the federal government’s most rigorous evidence review on educational interventions, found that dual enrollment programs have no discernible effects on general academic achievement at the college level and only potentially positive effects on college readiness, with a small extent of evidence in both cases (U.S. Department of Education, 2017). Findings on degree attainment and credit accumulation are more favorable, but those benefits flow primarily to students who were already prepared to do college-level work.
Readiness, then, is the variable that matters most, and the developmental literature is clear that readiness is uneven across adolescence. The prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain responsible for planning, judgment, impulse regulation, and complex cost-benefit reasoning, continues to mature well into the early twenties. Hartley and Somerville (2015) describe how adolescents weigh reward, uncertainty, and delayed outcomes differently than adults, with the result that even academically capable students may struggle to translate intellectual ability into the kind of self-directed academic conduct that college coursework assumes.
A separate body of research speaks directly to the emotional pull young people often feel toward adult environments. Joseph Allen and colleagues at the University of Virginia followed a community sample of adolescents from age thirteen into their early twenties and found that early adolescent pseudomaturity, the appearance of being older or more sophisticated than one’s years, predicted long-term difficulties in close relationships, problems with substance use, and elevated rates of delinquent behavior in young adulthood (Allen, Schad, Oudekerk, & Chango, 2014). Earlier work by Newcomb (1996) and Galambos, Barker, and Tilton-Weaver (2003) reached similar conclusions: adolescents who step into adult roles too quickly often pay a developmental cost that does not surface until much later.
These findings echo what David Elkind named decades ago in The Hurried Child, that pressing children to mimic adult sophistication, however well-intentioned, deprives them of the time and space their development requires (Elkind, 2007). Subsequent research has only deepened his original observation.
Colere’s Position
Colere does not oppose dual enrollment as a category. We do, however, hold that it is the wrong default for most students and that placing a young person in college coursework should follow careful, individualized discernment rather than precede it.
Three convictions shape this stance. First, education at Colere is whole-person formation. A student is not only a mind to be filled but a soul, a body, and a member of a family and a community. Coursework that advances the intellect while outpacing the emotional or spiritual life is not a gain but a fragmentation. Second, childhood and adolescence are not stages to be hurried through. Scripture treats each season of life as a gift, and our pedagogy reflects that conviction. The goal is to inhabit the present stage well, not to graduate from it early. Third, parents know their child best. Our role is to walk alongside the family with the school’s particular knowledge of curriculum, classroom dynamics, and the developmental literature, while the family remains the primary decision-maker.
How We Walk With Families
When a family asks about dual enrollment, our advisement is individual rather than programmatic. We listen carefully to the student’s intellectual life, the family’s hopes, and the specific course or program under consideration. We ask whether the student is ready not only academically but spiritually and emotionally, whether they can hold the relational and ethical complexity of an adult classroom without either retreating from it or being shaped by it in ways their formation cannot yet absorb. When a student is ready, we help make the experience successful and integrated with the rest of their education at Colere. When they are not yet ready, we say so plainly, and we continue to offer the rich, demanding, beautifully formed coursework Colere already provides while the student grows.
This is, in the end, a posture of protection in the older and warmer sense of the word: not protection from challenge, but protection of the conditions under which a young person can become who they are meant to be.
References
Allen, J. P., Schad, M. M., Oudekerk, B., & Chango, J. (2014). What ever happened to the “cool” kids? Long-term sequelae of early adolescent pseudomature behavior. Child Development, 85(5), 1866–1880. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12250
Elkind, D. (2007). The hurried child: Growing up too fast too soon (25th anniversary ed.). Da Capo Press.
Galambos, N. L., Barker, E. T., & Tilton-Weaver, L. C. (2003). Who gets caught at maturity gap? A study of pseudomature, immature, and mature adolescents. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 27(3), 253–263. https://doi.org/10.1080/01650250244000326
Hartley, C. A., & Somerville, L. H. (2015). The neuroscience of adolescent decision-making. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 5, 108–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2015.09.004
Newcomb, M. D. (1996). Pseudomaturity among adolescents: Construct validation, sex differences, and associations in adulthood. Journal of Drug Issues, 26(2), 477–504. https://doi.org/10.1177/002204269602600209
U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, What Works Clearinghouse. (2017). Dual enrollment programs: Intervention report. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/intervention/1043
Weir, K. (2022, July 1). What neuroscience tells us about the teenage brain. Monitor on Psychology, 53(5), 56. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/07/feature-neuroscience-teen-brain