Brown: At 40, Minnesota’s PSEO program earns an incomplete

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Forty years ago, Gov. Rudy Perpich signed the Postsecondary Enrollment Options into law, allowing eligible high school juniors and seniors in Minnesota to earn college credits.

The program was the first of its kind and remains the most generous of any dual enrollment initiative in the country. Minnesota students and families do not pay for college in the PSEO program, nor for concurrent enrollment credits offered in the high schools. Funding follows students to the institution they choose.

PSEO became an immediate hit with students and their families. It cut the rapidly increasing cost of college tuition, allowing students to earn degrees earlier and with less debt. But PSEO’s funding model continues to foster a complicated, often contentious relationship between schools and colleges. Today, PSEO enjoys bipartisan support but also demonstrates the need for systemic reform.

When the PSEO program started, Perpich wanted to increase access to advanced coursework and the number of Minnesota students who went to college. His perspective was personal. Higher education had propelled the Iron Range son of a Croatian-American miner to dentistry, the state Senate and eventually the governor’s mansion.

“My commitment is to make sure we’re prepared for the 21st century,” Perpich told a December 1985 gathering of skeptical superintendents in Marshall, Minn., as reported by the Worthington Daily Globe.

But some of the old wounds are still fresh.

In an Aug. 13, 1985, Brainerd Dispatch story, Brainerd Schools superintendent Bob Gross feared the hit that Advanced Placement courses might take if all the eligible students did PSEO instead:

“We can talk about all our lofty programs at the high school, but I don’t see how that can compete with two years of college free and a diploma by the time [a student] is 18. I see so little in this system to strengthen our academic program.”

What’s striking about this quote is that superintendents today share the same concern, especially when lost enrollment limits the curriculum a district can offer.

Brainerd High School is only a mile from Central Lakes College, making PSEO an attractive option for students. Last year, 215 Brainerd juniors and seniors chose full- or part-time PSEO, mostly at Central Lakes. Another 110 students took college classes at the high school using the concurrent enrollment option.

“The relationship between the two is like a divorced couple sharing custody over their children,” said Grant.

He said that college credentialing requirements make it more difficult to offer college in the schools. Meantime, students who choose PSEO and fail courses needed for graduation find themselves back at the high school with their diplomas in doubt.

From the college side, PSEO students are now crucial to liberal arts enrollment. For example, Jackson said a third of enrollment at Anoka-Ramsey Community College is from PSEO students. As college enrollments have declined in recent years, high school students have filled in the gaps.

Gross left Brainerd in 1999 to become superintendent of the private Singapore American School. Now retired, he’s back in Minnesota. I reached him by phone to see how he felt today.

“If a student could benefit from it, it would be wrong to deny the student the chance to receive an education,” he said. “My concern was on avoiding rigor. It was very hard for our instructors at the high school to accept that they would be losing students to something they would consider inferior.”

Emily Hanson is the dual enrollment coordinator for the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. She and a staff of advisers help up to 700 students take courses at the U each year, and oversee a concurrent enrollment program that delivers university courses to about 10,000 students in 150 Minnesota high schools.

“We know that we have to [collaborate] to make this work,” said Hanson. “No one institution can meet the needs of all students.”

Jackson said the root of the issue is that the line between high school and college has been blurring for some time, yet we view them as separate institutions. “We need a broader reimagining of the purpose of education, of higher ed, what are the needs of the workforce, especially in the age of AI,” he said. “Our educational and funding sources haven’t really changed in 40 years.”

After 40 years of PSEO and concurrent enrollment, 43% of Minnesota students have taken at least one college course while in high school, well above the national average of about 20%. No one I talked to suggested the program would be going away any time soon.

So, let us consider its lessons.

Likewise, not all 16- and 17-year-olds are academically or emotionally prepared for college. Pushing them through before they’re ready sets back some students.

When a high school loses hundreds of students to PSEO, it faces funding challenges that affect all students. On the other hand, PSEO students provide important market feedback on the educational environment they want.

Our state’s E-12 and higher education systems function differently, perhaps too differently for the demographic and fiscal times. School districts and colleges must adapt as enrollments fall across the board.

“It’s a question of what does education look like in the 21st century,” said Jackson.