Lots of Florida high school students are taking advantage of dual enrollment to get a head start on the writing courses that Florida’s public colleges and universities require. In the fall of 2022, 18,721 students were taking the first semester college writing course, coded as ENC 1101. Another 3,191 were taking the second semester writing course, ENC 1102.
While ENC 1101 was the most popular dual enrollment class in the fall of 2022, College Algebra (MAC 1105) was the second most popular. That course was being taken by 9,352 students.
But College Algebra does not progress students toward bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields – at least not the math-intensive ones like engineering and the physical and computing sciences. In fact, taking College Algebra via dual enrollment in high school generally ejects a student from the STEM pipeline.
So how many Florida high school students are taking dual enrollment courses that advance them toward bachelors’ degrees in math-intensive STEM fields? Not many.
Only 705 students were dual enrolled in MAC 2311, the first calculus course for STEM majors. Another 381 were dual enrolled in the second STEM major calculus course (MAC 2312) and 125 were taking the third course in the sequence (MAC 2313).
For comparison, 14,462 students were taking the Advanced Placement class that provides credit for MAC 2311, AP Calculus AB. The AP equivalent to MAC 2312, AP Calculus BC, enrolled 4,294.
Dual enrollment physics classes that provide progress toward bachelors’ degrees in STEM fields attracted even fewer students than the calculus courses did, and their enrollments were dwarfed by those of the AP courses that provide credit for the same courses. The two semester sequence of physics courses generally taken by life and health science majors (which do not use calculus), PHY 2053 and PHY 2054, registered only 48 and 11 students, respectively. The corresponding AP courses, AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2, were being taken by 6,103 and 647, respectively.
The physics courses required for students majoring in engineering and the physical and computing sciences are the calculus-based physics courses PHY 2048 and PHY 2049. In the fall 2022 semester, those courses were taken via dual enrollment by 134 and 15 students, respectively. The equivalent AP courses, AP Physics C Mechanics and AP Physics C Electricity and Magnetism, were being taken by 1,346 and 225 students, respectively.
Larger numbers of high school students were dual enrolled for chemistry courses for STEM majors. The first semester class, CHM 1045 (also coded as CHM C045 and CHM 2045), registered 1,060 students, and the second semester class, CHM 1046 (or CHM C046 or CHM 2046), enrolled 176 students. Nevertheless, these numbers were still much smaller than the enrollment in AP Chemistry, 5,382.
The table below shows Florida’s twenty most popular dual enrollment courses in fall 2022. It’s worth noting that the only natural science course among the top twenty is BSC 1005, a general education course in biology. It does not count toward a bachelor’s degree in any life or health science field.
All of the information here was taken from the Florida Department of Education Advanced Reports Portal.
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