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Research — Policy Center

Opening the Doors to the Jobs of the Future

Expanding Early College access and strengthening career-connected learning are critical to ensuring Massachusetts maintains a competitive, skilled workforce, and this report outlines four key objectives to guide the state’s expansion strategy.

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Key Takeaways

  • Massachusetts must significantly expand Early College programs to reach more low-income students, as current enrollment remains too limited to make a substantial impact. The state should prioritize high-potential high schools and utilize hybrid or online learning models to ensure accessibility, particularly for students in rural areas.
  • Current Early College programs lack structured connections to high-demand industries like health and STEM. A more robust program should integrate specialized advising, career development experiences, and credit accumulation targets, while also aligning Early College with Innovation and Career Pathway (ICP) programs.
  • Expanding Early College to middle-income students can create more diverse learning environments, strengthen urban schools, and support high school redesign in smaller districts. Targeted strategies include regional partnerships, urban magnet schools, and enrollment goals that promote integration in Boston and the Gateway Cities.
  • Sustainable Early College expansion will require clear governance structures, accountability measures, and administrative capacity. Some necessary policy changes will need to be addressed through board decisions, legislation, and budget appropriations.

March 3, 2025

Executive Summary

Early College has demonstrated exceptional power to open doors to the jobs of the future and ensure that Massachusetts maintains the large skilled workforce that is central to its economic competitiveness. To build on the legislature’s considerable investment in this initiative and harness the full potential of Early College, Massachusetts must expand access to this program to far more students and provide them with robust, career-connected learning experiences. State education policymakers are currently devising a strategy to guide Early College expansion. This MassINC Policy Center white paper proposes four high-level objectives for the plan, with rationale and recommendations for achieving them:

Objective 1: Provide universal access to all low-income students who could benefit from Early College.

Rationale:

  • Low-income students are enrolling and completing college at half the rate of non-low-income students, and the gap is growing. Early College consistently doubles the odds that low-income students enroll and persist in higher education. However, access to this program remains very limited. After seven years, the Massachusetts Early College Initiative (MECI) has reached just 4 percent of low-income high school students.
  • To have a significant impact on the state’s skilled workforce, Massachusetts will need to provide Early College to the maximum number of students who could benefit. Analysis of current enrollment patterns suggests that there are approximately 28,000 low-income students who could benefit from Early College and who would likely take advantage of it given access.
  • Massachusetts can reach about half of these low-income students by selectively expanding Early College in the 104 high schools that have more than 400 students and below-average rates of college matriculation. This includes 67 high schools within 5 miles of a public college or university that could provide primarily on-campus learning, as well as 37 high schools in more rural areas that could provide hybrid/online Early College.

Recommendation: The Early College expansion strategy must advance policies that expedite growth in the 104 high-potential high schools, while laying the groundwork for models that will eventually expand access to all low-income students who could benefit. The plan must include particular emphasis on increasing hybrid/online learning to both reach rural students and efficiently deepen course options for those participating in primarily on-campus programs.

Objective 2: Integrate robust career pathways to draw more students to Early College and prepare them for the full breadth of professional opportunities in the state’s advanced industries.

Rationale:

  • Early College pathways that expose students to advanced industries and prepare them to pursue degrees in these fields are underdeveloped. Accounts from local partnerships suggest that MECI is actively discouraging programs from developing career-connected Early College pathways.
  • A lack of opportunities for applied and contextualized learning constrains growth by severely limiting students’ interest in Early College. A general education-focused approach also hamstrings the intervention’s innate potential to place students on pathways to fields such as health and STEM, which require long sequences of challenging academic courses

Recommendation: The plan should identify career pathways for strategic focus. For each of these priority pathways, the plan should lay out action items to expedite the development of a more robust program of study that includes specialized advising, high-quality career development experiences, and credit accumulation goals tailored to what is reasonable and achievable for students in each of these fields. In addition, the plan should provide opportunities to integrate Early College with Innovation and Career Pathway (ICP) programs, including by prioritizing existing ICP programs for hybrid/online Early College expansion.

Objective 3: Enroll middle-income students with the aim of providing more opportunities to learn in racially, ethnically, and economically-integrated settings, while furthering high school redesign in smaller school districts with modest resources.

Rationale:

  • Early College is one of the few reliable tools that Massachusetts has at its disposal to increase racial, ethnic, and economic integration in its secondary schools. Early College also provides an efficient strategy to help many smaller rural and suburban communities redesign their high schools to give students a wider range of opportunities. Strategically expanding Early College to middle-income students will give all students in Massachusetts more opportunities to learn in integrated settings, accelerate the preparation of more workers for high-demand fields, and help maintain broad-based political support for the initiative.
  • To ensure that Early College programs in Boston and the Gateway Cities are economically-integrated,Massachusetts will need to provide Early College to at least 15,000 middle-income students.

Recommendation: The plan should include three core tactics to increase integration: (1) fostering the growth of strong programs in urban high schools to help cities attract and retain middle-income families, (2) creating regional partnerships that allow students from different high schools to learn side-by-side in college courses, and (3) building a discrete number of wall-to-wall Early College magnet schools that draw students from multiple districts to the state’s largest cities. In addition, goals and key performance metrics must be carefully structured to encourage integration in Boston and the Gateway Cities.

Objective 4: Establish mechanisms for governance, accountability, and administration.

Rationale:

  • Accelerating the growth of high-quality Early College programs that prepare students for the jobs of the future with career-connected learning and opportunities to learn alongside diverse peers will require governance, accountability, and administrative structures.

Recommendation: The Early College expansion plan can surface these needs and address some of them directly, but many will also require board-level policy decisions, legislation, and/or budget appropriations. The figure below summarizes the action steps the plan should seek to prioritize and the appropriate vehicle to advance them.

Topics

Economic Development, Education