Similarly, community colleges are placing greater emphasis on aligning community college degree requirements with entrance requirements to four-year institutions. Alignment is seen as a way to help students move on to complete a four-year degree. Alignment may also increase educational opportunities for students or members of groups historically underrepresented at four-year colleges and universities. Community college students are, as a group, more likely to be low-income and minority than those who enter a four-year institution directly from high school.The broader the opportunity for community college students to eventually complete a four-year degree, the more diverse enrollments at four-year institutions will become.

Expansion of Advanced Placement (AP) Courses

Many state systems have also embarked on integrating and expanding advanced courses into curricular reform efforts, based on the common-sense observation that students who have taken challenging courses are going to be better prepared for college than those who have not. A 1999 study for the Department concluded that students who had taken an advanced course in high school were more likely to graduate from college and that the student's success in the advanced course was a better predictor of college admission than economic status, grade-point average or SAT scores.

As the College Board has found, AP courses are valuable to any student planning to attend college, but are of even more importance to students without family experience of college attendance, among peer groups who do not consider education a promising option for the future, or in schools not emphasizing college preparation.Nevertheless, about half of American high schools offer no AP courses.Students in rural and inner-city schools are most likely to be handicapped by the lack of AP courses. The federal government and institutions are responding to this problem with innovative AP strategies and programs. Some of these strategies and programs are highlighted below.

Strategies and Programs

• U.S. Department of Education--Advanced Placement Incentives Program
• Texas--AP examinations and expansion of AP teacher training
• Florida--AP teacher performance bonuses
• Kentucky--Special high school diplomas earned by AP course completion

U.S. Department of Education

The Department's Advanced Placement Incentives program, a component of No Child Left Behind, supports expansion of opportunities for students to challenge themselves with AP courses through awards to national non-profit organizations, states, school districts and charter schools. The Department spent $22.3 million in fiscal year 2003 on these AP initiatives.Additionally, the Department's Advanced Placement Test Fee program makes awards to state education agencies to cover part or all of the cost of test fees for low-income students who are enrolled in an AP course and plan to take the exam. These programs pay for courses and fees for both the AP program and for the highly demanding International Baccalaureate (IB) program.

The Department announced on October 10, 2003, that it will spend $11 million on 22 grants for promising activities in grades 6-12 to increase the number of low-income students who are ready to succeed in advanced courses. In announcing these grants, Secretary Paige noted that, "with the rapidly changing world, our high schools must prepare students to compete in a new and complex world. At the high school level, nothing exemplifies this need better than Advanced Placement programs. In recent years, our nation has made solid progress in making sure our low-income students have access to these kinds of classes and assessments. In just the past four years, the number of AP tests taken by low-income students has risen 64 percent." As Secretary Paige pointed out, "We should take great pride in that progress. But access is not enough. Now we need to make sure that more of our students are prepared to succeed in these rigorous courses."