S3E8: Benefits to Dual Enrollment and Middle Colleges with Delenn Ganyo
Today's question of the week- "What is dual enrollment and what benefits does it offer?”
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Today's question of the week- “What is dual enrollment and what benefits does it offer?"
In this episode of the "Admittedly" podcast, host Thomas Caleel interviews Delenn Ganyo, a colleague in college admissions and social media management. They discuss the topic of dual enrollment, middle colleges, and the benefits and challenges of pursuing non-traditional educational paths.
Summary of Key Points:
1. Introduction to Dual Enrollment: Dual enrollment allows high school students to take college-level courses alongside their high school curriculum, often earning college credits. This approach provides students with an accelerated learning path and can lead to early graduation or advanced standing in college.
2. Middle Colleges as an Accelerated Learning Model: Middle colleges represent a "supercharged" dual enrollment model, allowing students to earn significant college credits and potentially complete an associate's degree while still in high school. Delenn shares personal experiences of thriving in this environment and highlights the importance of student-driven motivation.
3. Comparing Dual Enrollment and AP Courses: Unlike AP courses taught by high school teachers, dual enrollment classes are taught by college instructors and often provide guaranteed transferable credits. This distinction makes dual enrollment a potentially more reliable option for students aiming to cut down on college time or costs.
4. Benefits of Middle Colleges: Attending a middle college can provide academic challenges, make students more competitive in university applications, and allow for early specialization or interdisciplinary study. Delenn discusses the personal advantages and opportunities they gained from this educational path.
5. Considerations for Non-Traditional Educational Paths: While middle colleges and dual enrollment offer exciting opportunities, they may not be suitable for everyone. Students should assess their own academic interests and readiness, ensuring that their educational path aligns with their goals and learning style.
Thomas Caleel and guest Delenn Ganyo emphasize the importance of understanding one's educational preferences and exploring non-traditional paths like dual enrollment and middle colleges. These options can offer accelerated learning and unique opportunities for students who are passionate about academics and eager to challenge themselves.
Have your own question you want answered? Leave us a comment on social media @admittedlypodcast for a chance to be featured.
About Thomas Caleel:
Thomas is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania. After earning his MBA at the Wharton School of Business in 2003, he moved to Silicon Valley. For three years, he was Director of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid at Wharton. He worked closely with admissions professionals, students, alumni, and professors to curate the best possible MBA class. Thomas has been an entrepreneur his entire life in the fields of finance, agriculture, wellness, and sporting goods. As the founder of Global Education Opportunities LLC, he works as a high-level admissions advisor to help families and students achieve their education goals. Thomas started the podcast Admittedly because he is passionate about demystifying the application process for all parents and applicants.
About Delenn Ganyo (@delennganyo):
Delenn Ganyo is an academic tutor and admissions coach from Santa Barbara, California. They completed their Master’s in English in December 2024, graduating previously from UC Santa Barbara in 2021 with Bachelor’s degrees in chemistry, anthropology, and writing. Attaining their first college degree—an Associates of mathematics—the day before their high school graduation, Delenn has placed a lifelong emphasis on education and academic achievement. Delenn tutors academic subjects such as English composition, creative writing, mathematics, and chemistry, also prepping students for standardized tests including the new digital SAT. Post-graduation, Delenn has completed additional certifications in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages and Generative AI for Educators. In their free time, they write literary analysis papers about science-fiction and fantasy.
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Thomas: Welcome to the Admittedly Podcast. I'm your host, Thomas Caleel. And today we have a very special guest: Delenn Ganyo. Delenn, welcome. For those of you who might not know Delenn and I work together on Admittedly and on the admissions side, and Delenn also oversees our social media. And they posted a very interesting clip, got a lot of action, and one of the questions was about dual enrollment. And so we started talking, and I realized that there are a lot of things around dual enrollment that I don't know. And I love learning new things. I love talking with very smart people about very different things. And Delenn is one of those smart people. So Delenn, why don't we start? Just tell us a little bit about yourself, give us some background?
Delenn: Yeah, so I am, I call myself a chronic academic, I am trapped in academia for the rest of my life, because it is the only thing that keeps me fully entertained and engaged. So I started that passion when I attended a type of high school called a middle college, which is basically if dual enrollment was on steroids, it is the most dually enrolled type of school you can get to it's called the whole school model of dual enrollment. And it is something that I am here to elucidate to tell some details about it for people who might not be familiar with this type of school.
Thomas: Sounds great. Love the word elucidate, definitely proving your bona fides here.
Delenn: SAT vocabulary.
Thomas: Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things I like and one of the things I'm really glad to have you on the podcast about is we get a lot of flack on social media about how we're very elitist and pushing everyone down this prep school to IV plus track. Even though we repeatedly say there are so many different modalities, so many different tracks. And you are obviously very involved in academia very bright, and you've taken a non-traditional path. Can you just kind of talk our listeners through that.
Delenn: So for those who are saying we're shills for private institutions, I have never gone to a private school, I went to a public high school, which is just the type of school was a charter school, but it is still run by the government. I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for my undergraduate, which is also a public school. And I fully believe that you can get the most out of academia without paying more than average for an education, I fully believe it. So for me, it was more of knowing myself from a very young age that I was willing to put in the work intellectually, rather than in other ways, specifically, to further my academics at as rapid pace as I possibly could. And for me, I was given the beneficial opportunity that I was able to get into this middle college, which was granting me the opportunity to take just a metric ton of college courses from the age 15 until I was 18, and graduated from high school. And because I was able to do all of this, I actually was able to graduate the day before my high school graduation with three associate's degrees. And because of that, it really expedited a lot of my furthering of my academics and how quickly I was able to get into the types of jobs that I wanted and knew I wanted the whole time.
Thomas: Okay, great. And you are currently applying for PhD programs?
Delenn: I am, yes. I am. In the process of applying for PhDs, I finished my Master's December of 2023. And I am in the process, so they haven't opened yet for the applications, but I'm prepping my materials. So that is definitely where I'm just tunneling myself into just staying there forever school.
Thomas: That is fantastic. A life sentence. So you mentioned something about middle colleges being like this supercharged dual enrollment scenario, if I heard you correctly, I think it probably be good for our listeners. If you could define what what does dual enrollment mean?
Delenn: Yes, a dual enrollment is any instance where a high schooler is also enrolled in addition to their high school in a college-level program. So a community college the UC program has an online version of this as well and–
Thomas: And just quickly, sorry, by UC, you mean the University of California system?
Delenn: University of California. UC Berkeley, UC Davis, et cetera, et cetera. And these are all options that students can take where they are both enrolled in their high school classes, while simultaneously taking college-level classes from college professors.
Thomas: Okay, and is that unique to California?
Delenn: Absolutely not. It is more unique to the United States as the rest of the world has their own versions of advanced placement opportunities. However, there are over 1000, I don't remember the exact number. But there are over a thousand middle college, early colleges, and dual enrollment programs set up in the United States.
Thomas: Okay, so as a high schooler, you're taking your high school classes and college classes at the same time.
Delenn: You are yes, and sometimes. So there are a certain number of classes that have to be fulfilled by your high school level requirements. So you have to take for example, ninth grade English is a requirement that you have to take from high school. However, you can fulfill certain other requirements, such as often math, through college classes that are taken at let's say, a community college. You can take calculus two, at a community college and have that count to fulfil your high school math requirement of a certain number of units or hours, generally, is how they measure it at a high school level, but a certain amount of hours of instruction for a field.
Thomas: And what would be the advantage of doing this? Why would you do this?
Delenn: Well, I would say I was the type of student who got bored very easily at school. And because of it, I didn't perform as well, I wasn't challenged, I didn't feel challenged that is, and because of that, I would goof off a little bit. My way wasn't class clown, it was just doodling in the margins of my notebook, writing novels, things like that. But I wouldn't focus on what the teachers wanted to be teaching me because I didn't feel it was moving fast enough, I would do my homework before the lesson was taught. That was the type of student I was. And once I was able to go to this middle college that I attended, I didn't feel that I was having to twiddle my thumbs anymore and fill time that I should be focused on lessons because the lessons were at a rapid enough pace and challenging enough. And I was held to a high enough standard, that I just I blossomed that is the environment that I was able to do my best and I need, I need deadlines, I need expectations to be set very high for me. And for some students, that's a good fit. And for some students, that's not going to be a good fit. And knowing yourself is very important before you attend a middle college.
Thomas: Okay, but before we get to the middle college, I'm trying to frame for our listeners who like me, may not be completely familiar with this dual enrollment.
Delenn: Yeah.
Thomas: So what would be the difference between say dual enrollment and AP? Do you do your APS first and then move on to college classes? Or how do you structure that?
Delenn: So some students don't do AP at all. I never took an AP class. Okay, I only did dual enrollment.
Thomas: Okay.
Delenn: And what I would say is the easiest way to separate them as AP classes are college level material that's taught by a high school teacher in high school. Dual enrollment classes are taught our college level material that's taught by a college instructor, usually in the context of a college lecture hall or classroom.
Thomas: Okay.
Delenn: And functionally, when you transfer those units, it can differ, because for example, AP, increasingly schools are not counting them as transferable units, especially if you don't score high enough. However, if you pass with a C, a dual enrollment class, it will transfer and you can check this out on assist.org, I believe, but Assist is this. It's a database of all these agreements, their contracts, so you can't get around them, where a community college has agreed with institutions like universities, that this class transfers to this class at this school in it, it counts as a prereq. It counts as the unit requirement for certain things. And you can transfer, depending on what school you can transfer at least 60 units, which is the equivalent of an associate's degree.
Thomas: That's that's quite a bit especially nowadays, when some schools like Dartmouth, for example, are not accepting APs.
Delenn: Yes, yes, I, I do feel a little bad for people who go into AP thinking that this is going to cut a year or two off of their undergraduate experience. And then they're run into this issue where the credits just don't transfer to their specific dream school. And with the benefit of assist.org, you can actually see directly, “Oh, I took English 101. That's gonna transfer to English 1 at University of Minnesota and it will count for four units.” For example.
Thomas: No, great example. So now, because you've been chomping at the bit to get to middle colleges, something truthfully, I had not heard of.
Delenn: Yeah.
Thomas: And so I love learning something new. What is the middle college and why would somebody want to attend?
Delenn: A middle college is the whole school model of early colleges, and early colleges are a type of dual enrollment where you have the opportunity to, if you want, to earn enough credits to get an associate's degree during high school.
Thomas: Okay
Delenn: So that is the gist of… they’re very overlapping terminology, but each have their own little unique niches.
Thomas: Got it. And why would I want to attend a school like that?
Delenn: There are a lot of reasons. If you just like being challenged, that is always one benefit. It makes you competitive in applications to universities. Absolutely. Because of the fact that there are about a thousand, out of the hundreds of thousands of total high schools in the country, there are more unique type of academic background to have. So they set you apart in a certain way. You are competing with… it's a very, you know, your pond is filled with people who are also at a very high caliber of academic prowess. But at the same time, you can really blossom in that environment as I found I did. Also, you can get a specific associate's for transfer, if you know what you want to major in. My little sister also attended a middle college. She got an Associate's for transfer in sociology, she graduated undergrad the same year as me even though she's two years younger, because she cut two years off of that.
Thomas: Very interesting, okay, and, and so the advantages are: you can reduce the number of classes you need to take to graduate university. And then you can either graduate early, or actually just go much deeper into your field of study.
Delenn: Yes, or I would argue, you can even turn it in an interdisciplinary route. Where because I was guaranteed… when you're admitted to a four year institution, you're able to sign a contract with the institution usually, where they have to agree to let you keep taking classes for four years. Because you were admitted as a freshman–you would be admitted as a freshman, not a transfer with a middle college. So if you were admitted, as a freshman, you're guaranteed for four years of, you know, education, as long as you behave well, you don't do anything crazy, et cetera, you're not expelled. This means that you get four years. I would have been able to finish my schooling in about two years if I wanted to. However, I knew I wanted to engage with what the university I attended had to offer. And I did that in my own unique way by getting three separate Bachelors in different fields. In three and a half years still, so I was still able to not pay more than I would have, if I hadn't attended middle college. But my middle college units transferred, I think I had between 100 and 120 of them. And then I locked the school in and I said, you have to give me four years of my education if I pay for it. And because I did that, I was able to actually get a Bachelor's in three different fields, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.
Thomas: I love that. And I love the fact that you because we talk about this a lot on the podcast and on social media, about figuring out your path and understanding what you want from it. And you clearly did you were playing 3D Chess, you were literally thinking four to six years out, and making the most of that. So I love that. I think it's a great example. And just to clarify, because you touched on this, you didn't have to pay extra for this. This was a public education?
Delenn: It is a public school, the type I attended was a charter. So they have slightly different requirements. And each state depending on if it's charter or not, there are middle colleges that are offered through the just the education department for an area like the the public school system. However, the type I attend was a charter. I did not have to pay for it. They were even at my school specifically, this is very specific to mine. There were even textbook banks for those who couldn't afford to pay for the college-level textbooks that would have been required because you do have to pay for materials. They had textbook banks for students that were low income that couldn't afford them. And there was… they were doing everything they could to make sure this was accessible to anyone who qualified and was willing to put in the effort.
Thomas: I love that and I love everything about that and still have traumatic experience, memories of buying my college textbooks and grad school textbooks. That was a real Lulu. But you know, we're gonna get questions around the fact like this sounds for somebody who isn't maybe so academically inclined, it sounds just like a grind like a nerd school. Did you guys have fun? Were there sports or? or clubs? Or do you guys just go and study all day?
Delenn: So I think a lot of the social environments were oriented around academia, but that doesn't mean that they weren't fun. Okay, so for example, I talk in my PhD letter of intent about how one of my favorite things to do in high school was I had a lot of friends who were two years younger than me because my sister was younger. And I would have sleepovers with these girls and they would bring their essays, their English essays, and we would order so much McDonald's and eat nuggets all night stay up until 1am and I would edit them in glitter gel pen. I would edit their essays. And that was something we did, and we genuinely found it fun. So no, it's not a school for everyone.
Thomas: Got it.
Delenn: And that's part of why I think you really need to know yourself, you can't just do this because your mom expects you to this has to be student driven. I do think that especially the students who are the younger sibling of a attendee, who is being grandfathered in, you need to think about whether this is the right choice for you. And parents of someone who is in this position where you have siblings and the younger sibling perhaps is less interested in that, don't force them to do it. But really don't. It's, it's not going to be for the best, you'd rather have a student get consistently good grades in a normal environment go more of that standard route, and be able to have more choice in their future than you would force them to attend these classes, they get mostly B's, it actually ruins their GPA, it just doesn't turn out well for them. And then they can't attend even the type of school that they would have wanted to, which might not even be one of those Ivy plus schools, but they might not get in because they just were put in an environment that didn't allow them to flourish.
Thomas: Right. And couldn't agree more. And we've talked about this about boarding schools, you know, things like that. You can't force that to the child that the student has to if they fit in, like you did they thrive. Right. And so, this a little fun fact about Delenn. They are a published science fiction author–
Delenn: Self published.
Thomas: Self published, but we're gonna just stick with published. Did you do that during middle college? When did you write your books?
Delenn: Yes, I have three novels–they're technically novel-length–that I released between ages, I believe I was 15, when I published the first one. And then I was 18, when I released the last one. And this was what I did, during my passing period, I went in the school computer lab, and I would type type type. They had terrible keyboards. I didn't like them very much. But I did it anyway. And my friends would help me edit them. And it was very much a passion project for a little while, before I oriented myself more around literary analysis and comparative literature now, but I used to be very into creative prose.
Thomas: I love that. And, you know, it touches on a comment that we got on one of our social media posts about well, I'm from a small town, and there's nothing to do. And we offered some suggestions. But you know, something like this, you can write, even if you don't have access to a computer, you have a pen and paper, and you can write and create and do interesting things that give you something cool to talk about, and add a meaningful growth experience in the application.
Delenn: I actually have a recommendation for those who think they have no resources, if you have an internet connection and a decent computer. Arizona State offers a dual enrollment program online, I know because I was a teaching assistant for it for a little while, where the high school students can enroll through Arizona State University and get some of these dual enrollment credits. And the Master’s students, which is–this was while I was completing my Master’s–are your teaching assistant, they're giving you feedback on your work. And ultimately, I think it can be really roaring.
Thomas: I love that. Berkeley Extension as well. I mean, UC Berkeley offers something similar. So and those are just two examples. There are a lot of examples out there that you can go and take college courses dual enrollment for credit. And you don't, it doesn't even need to be a strategy it can be if you're interested in chemistry, and you've already capped out at your high school, you know, going and pursuing that is a great way to satisfy your intellectual curiosity and just demonstrate your love of something and learn more in a field that you care about and want to study at university.
Delenn: Yeah, fully. And even if you aren't going in the direction of university, I would say. There are plenty of very acute, bright young people who want to go to trade school. But you know what, if you want to be a welder, there's a benefit in having a scientific background to knowing what you're doing. And figuring out some of those things, or an electrician, electrical engineers and stuff like that. You might not have a four year background, you might not have a Master's, but you can fully engage with those materials through these from a very young age and set yourself up for success in the long run.
Thomas: Absolutely. Well, I really appreciate you coming on today. Anything that you want to say in closing anything we didn't cover that you think is really important.
Delenn: Um… I would just remind people that if you really love academia, I think we're in an age where nerds are being accepted, but you don't have to feel bad about it. It fully can be a career for people. Teaching can be a passion and I think you should embrace it, and you can embrace that type of thing from a very young age if you are given the right environment to do so.
Thomas: Absolutely. I love that and I think it's a it's a very noble path and noble calling and and as somebody who I'm not a professor, I'm not even a formal teacher, but I I help educate and lead young applicants and students along their, their academic journey. To me, it's very fulfilling and I love it. So I share your enthusiasm. Delenn, thank you so much for joining us today.
Delenn: Thank you for having me.
