Helping High School Students Prepare for College Initiative | New Jersey Council of County Colleges

Helping High School Students Prepare for College

New Jersey’s Community Colleges are committed to partnering with high schools across the state to help prepare more students for post-secondary education. Such efforts are critical to state efforts to increase the attainment of post-secondary degrees and credentials to 65% by 2025 and to closing troubling gaps in college completion by race and ethnicity.

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All Community Colleges in the state offer dual enrollment programs for high school students to earn college credits while in high school.

The College Readiness Now program, funded by the State of New Jersey through the Office of the Secretary of Higher Education, provides critical funding to Community Colleges to work with high schools to improve college readiness in math and/or English for students by the time they graduate from high school. This program also fosters Community College and high school partnerships that improve student success.

Local Collaboration to Ensure Student Success

The purpose of the College Readiness Now program is to support projects designed to get more students college-ready by the time they graduate from high school. Each individual project involves a locally designed collaboration among Community Colleges and area high schools that target and identify students who are not “college ready” through diagnostics and other measures provided by the local high school.

Once identified, the students in grades 9 through 12 are invited to participate in a transition or bridge course or courses designed to improve their academic, study and test-taking skills. The bridge course may be delivered by the college or by the high school; however, faculty from both institutions must provide guidance to the development and delivery of the instruction. At the end of the bridge course, the students’ skill levels will be reassessed to determine the success of each program.

Making Education a Priority

Making Education a Priority

Students living below the poverty line are the target population. Since the inception of the College Readiness Now program, 50% of participating students have become fully college-ready, while the remaining participating students moved up significantly in the developmental course sequence, saving themselves thousands of dollars in developmental education costs and accelerating time to degree completion. 

Some students are also able to participate in free dual-enrollment opportunities to earn college-credit prior to graduating high schools, and all students who participated in the program are given an opportunity to interact with college faculty for the first time, learn how to navigate the college admissions process, study on campuses and meet their peers from other local high schools in their districts.  

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