Students Speak Out for Dual Enrollment
“The benefits from dual enrollment are amazing. It has helped me boost my confidence, being more responsible, and helped me in high school. I also loved it because it treated me like an adult while I was in high school,” said Lina Iboa Orozco in her testimony before the Assembly Higher Education Committee in support of Assembly Bill 2617. Lina, a dual enrollment student at Kerman High School and Fresno City College, went on to say, “This also helped me clarify my career goals during my first semester. Not only that, it helped me get a small college experience, saved thousands of dollars and time. Now I am a senior with a total of 45 college units.”
AB 2617, Dual Enrollment Opportunities and Outreach, would enable local education agencies to establish new and support existing dual enrollment opportunities for high school students. Having completed her graduation requirements a semester early, Lina will be the first in her family to graduate from high school. Thanks to the coursework she’s completed at Fresno City College and West Hills College, she’ll soon be the first in her family to graduate college. She is on track to earn an associate degree in Allied Health in fall 2022. Lina is planning to go on to Sacramento State to obtain her BSN and eventually complete graduate work at UC Davis to become a physician assistant.
Lina talked about her experience starting out in dual enrollment, “By the time I sent my application and started my first semester of these courses, I started to get nervous because I thought I was not going to be smart enough to handle college and high school. Thankfully, I had the support from both my high school and college counselors as well as my teachers…. My college and high school counselor helped me [with] advice to take general ed courses as well as creating an educational plan. Without this support, I would not have … been able to do it.”
You can hear directly from Lina and other dual enrollment students in audiograms from the Fresno-Madera K-16 Collaborative. These short audio clips were produced by CLP for the collaborative and will be used to help build awareness of the soon-to-be-launched Virtual Dual Enrollment Hub, an online portal to support dual enrollment students in Fresno and Madera Counties.
