Accelerate ASU dual enrollment featured in University Business

A young person with long dark hair, clear-framed glasses, and a pink shirt leans over to look at a laptop screen alongside another young person with curly hair and glasses in a black t-shirt. A third person sits blurred in the background working on a laptop.

University Business examined how ASU built a dual enrollment model that works without a nearby campus, a minimum GPA or a credentialed teacher on the district payroll. The article traces the design to results in three schools serving rural and neurodivergent students.

Why the trade press picked it up

Dual enrollment keeps expanding as a college completion strategy, and the reporting increasingly asks a harder question: who does the standard model leave out? University Business answers that with the structural constraint. Conventional dual enrollment requires a college and a district to sit near each other, and it requires the district to employ someone with graduate credentials.

ASU removed both requirements. University faculty design, teach and grade the courses. Every class runs asynchronously. Learning materials are embedded, so the accessibility features and the textbook arrive with the course.

The evidence in the piece

Elma School District in rural Washington tripled its four-year college-going rate in three years. At Gateway Academy in Arizona, neurodivergent students routinely finish 10 or more college-level courses before graduation.

Accelerate ASU has now enrolled more than 35,000 students since 2021 across more than 800 K12 partner schools nationwide.

What it signals

The Learning Enterprise builds learning systems that reach students the existing ones cannot. Accelerate ASU is that thesis applied to the years before a diploma, and the article makes the mechanism legible to the superintendents and provosts who read it.

Read the article in University Business