Georgia lawmakers have taken steps in recent years to rein in the costs of the state’s increasingly popular dual enrollment program, which lets high school students receive credit for taking college courses.
But they’re not resting on those achievements. Given Georgia’s growing workforce demands, two legislative committees are working this summer to find ways both to ramp up the program and make it financially sustainable.
“The whole point of this study committee is developing more highly skilled talent at younger ages,” state Sen. Matt Brass, R-Newnan, said last month at the first meeting of a joint House-Senate study committee on dual enrollment he co-chairs. “The idea is to get [students] certified faster and into the workforce faster.”
“We’re not trying to fix something that’s broken,” added Georgia Rep. Matt Dubnik, R-Gainesville, the study committee’s other co-chairman. “We’re simply trying to take a good program and make it even better.”
The cost of the dual enrollment program, which had about 49,000 students enrolled as of last year, peaked at $105 million in fiscal 2020. That had been reduced to $76 million by the time the General Assembly adopted the fiscal 2024 state budget last March.
The difference is House Bill 444, which the legislature passed in 2020, capping the dual enrollment program at 30 hours.
Until then, dual enrollment students were free to take as many college courses as they wanted while still in high school, Irene Munn, a board member with the Georgia College and Career Academies Network, told the study committee.
“It was just way too much,” she said. “We set parameters on the amount of money [the state is] investing in dual enrollment.”
But Munn said House Bill 444 created “stumbling blocks” that needed to be addressed. Students were having to wait until they hit the 30-hour cap to begin taking technical college courses.
The General Assembly responded this year by passing Senate Bill 86, which lets dual enrollment students use funds from the state’s HOPE Grant program to pay for those career courses and earn an associate degree.
“It’s allowed us to get qualified students into the workforce sooner,” Munn said. “We’re getting kids into well-paying jobs at 18 and 20.”
Getting students into the workforce quickly is proving critical to meeting Georgia’s workforce demands. A wide range of professions are suffering shortages of workers.
“More nurses are retiring every year than are coming into the practice,” Scott Steiner, president and CEO of Phoebe Putney Health System in Albany, told members of the joint study committee. “We’ll be 80,000 short in Georgia by 2030 if we don’t turn it around.”
The number of trained workers is also failing to keep up with demand in other careers, including the skilled manufacturing trades.
Part of the problem is the stigma that surrounds blue-collar jobs. High-school counselors tend to steer students toward four-year colleges, as do many college-educated parents.
Greg Dozier, commissioner of the Technical College System of Georgia, said the system is working to expand the number of technical college courses that allow students to transfer credits seamlessly to a University System of Georgia institution.
