Dual Enrollment Sees a Surge in Number of Students

As a small part of campus, the dual enrollment program has seen a big jump in the number of high school students taking course work within the program. Up to about four hundred twenty students from about three hundred and thirty students, the program has seen a hundred and twenty six percent jump in enrollment from 2018-2019.
Dual enrollment has seen an uptick in popularity at not just Southern, but around the United States as the cost of college has soared, as the program offers high school students a way to earn college credits at a fraction of the cost. For Southern University’s dual enrollment program, high school students can earn college credits for about fifty dollars a credit hour. To put that in perspective, students at Southern pay around two hundred dollars per credit hour, making it a fourth of the cost of a regular student. When asked how he felt about the program, Derrick Stewart, a nursing student from New Orleans, Louisiana said that “The program is a good, cheap way to knock  some pre-reqs out before getting to college.”
Southern’s dual enrollment program is sadly only available to students who are within the state of Louisiana, but the program allows students some flexibility in how they take the course. Students looking for a more traditional class experience have the option of taking courses at one Southern University campus or at their home school with an approved faculty member, or, if they prefer a more hands off approach, as a hybrid course with the course being entirely online with a faculty member at the student’s home school serving as an advisor to ensure that the student is keeping on top of his/her course load. 
The program also offers high school students who would need to take remedial courses due to low ACT scores an opportunity to take those courses. Michael Smith, a freshman majoring in business administration, says that the dual enrollment program allowed him to test out of one of the remedial math classes, “I was lucky my counselor told me about [the program, because of her] I was able to get out a math class.”
The dual enrollment program has increased its staff of one to two, but the spike in enrollment can be traced to Interim Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Dr. Camacia Smith-Ross. As a class of 1992 Southern alumnus and a relatively new employee, Dr. Ross felt an obligation to not only fulfill her role, but to attack it, “the program was a tad bit stagnant, so we wanted to do some things that were a little bit more creative with our approach…to strengthen our program to allow us to compete with other institutions.” 
SUS President -Chancellor, Dr. Ray L. Belton has said that he eventually wants there to be twenty thousand students in the Southern University system. The dual enrollment program is one of the many programs that need to continue to improve in order for that vision to happen.