Dual Enrollment as an Interorganizational Field: Defining and Redefining Organizational Boundaries to Facilitate DE Coursetaking

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 21. School Organizational Policies, Programming, and Processes

Abstract

Dual enrollment (DE), where students earn college credits during high school, has expanded rapidly in the past two decades. DE students represent the fastest growing student population in higher education, particularly at community colleges, where they now represent one-fifth of all enrollees. To facilitate DE, institutional actors often make decisions about DE course offerings, teaching assignments, and instructional modality based on instructor availability, institutional resources, and convenience; this sometimes entails building or repurposing organizational structures. DE, therefore, constitutes an interorganizational field, where high schools and their partner colleges draw on the same “suppliers” (instructors) and “clients” (students) to enable high school students to earn college credit (Levi Martin, 2000; Ryu et al., 2024).
Drawing on field theory and organizational literature from public administration on “boundary spanners”—actors who operate across partner organizations, we use interview and site-visit data at three community colleges and their partner high schools to illustrate how personnel build and maintain the interorganizational field of DE. Our interviews and observations included 81 interviews with personnel across eight sites. We examine how actors within the interorganizational field understand their role responsibilities and how they set and span boundaries between partnering institutions. Improving the practical and theoretical understanding of how DE partnerships operate offers insights for theory on interorganizational fields while illuminating practical evidence to support this growing segment of the higher education population.
Our results show how actors, such as advising staff, administrators, and instructors, negotiate responsibilities at their organization and the interorganization. We find that actors at the partner organizations maintain strict boundaries for practices necessary to maintain their primary organization’s compliance with state policies linked to funding and credential attainment. However, specific personnel intentionally span boundaries to manage field logistics and student support, often motivated by the benefits of DE for their organization and community.

Authors

• Lauren Schudde, University of Texas-Austin

• Jessica Steiger, Teachers College

• Melissa Chavarria, University of Texas at Austin