That’s because through an innovative program called Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-TECH for short, many of the students are on track to earn an associate degree free of charge by the time they earn their high school diplomas.
The most recent publicly available data shows that in the 2024-2025 school year, 196 of the 207 students enrolled in P-TECH at Frederick Douglass – nearly 95% – were “on track” to earn both an associate degree and their high school diplomas within four years.
As colleges and universities face the oft-lamented “enrollment cliff” – a term used to describe the dwindling number of traditional age college students that exists due to a decline in birth rates – state officials credit the P-TECH program in Maryland with being a game-changer on the enrollment landscape.
“By removing financial barriers, integrating academic and career supports, and creating clear pathways from high school through college and into employment, P-TECH helps students envision themselves as college students long before high school graduation,” said Kellise Williamson, P-TECH coordinator for the Maryland State Department of Education.
“The result is not simply increased college enrollment, but a stronger, more equitable talent pipeline that benefits students, employers [and] higher education institutions.”
If the past is prologue, the 95% “on track” rate bodes well for Frederick Douglass High School, where 90% of the P-TECH graduates earned a high school diploma and associate degree in 4 years during the 2022-2023 school year – and 94% attended a four-year college directly after high school.
“Absolutely,” said Stacy Pinkett, the registrar at Frederick Douglass High School, told The EDU Ledger when asked if the program was getting students on track for college.
“Those students that graduate with an associate degree, they’re not going into college as freshmen,” Pinkett said, explaining that they already have two years of college completed. “They’ll definitely have a leg up on their peers going into college.”
Given the dire enrollment outlook for colleges and universities, the high associate degree completion rate for students in P-TECH at Frederick Douglass comes as welcome news, says Stan Litow, Professor and Innovator in Residence at Duke University and architect of the P-TECH program, a which began in 2011 in Brooklyn and has since been implemented at hundreds of schools nationwide and around the world.
“I don’t want to say P-TECH is the only solution to the enrollment problem. It’s not,” Litow said in an interview with The EDU Ledger. “But making a clear pathway from high school to college to career is something that addresses the enrollment challenge because more students who are in high school are not only completing their high school degree but they’re also completing their college degree and more likely to be career ready.”
Frederick Douglass High School is the only P-TECH high school in Prince George’s County – the Maryland county with the highest percentage and number of Black residents, at 58.8% and 564,636, respectively. Through a partnership with Prince George’s Community College, the school’s program offers degrees in health information management and hospitality services management.
P-TECH’s impact in Maryland extends beyond Prince George’s County. There are a total of nine P-TECH programs in six different school districts throughout the state.
P-TECH is credited with fueling dual enrollment in Maryland. The number of high school students enrolled in dual enrollment courses increased from just over 4,500 to nearly 20,000 between 2010 and 2021, a state report shows. “Additionally, most P-TECH program enrollments have increased annually, even throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,” the same report states.
The 90% associate degree completion rate in Prince George’s County stands in stark contrast to the 6% of P-TECH students statewide who completed an associate degree, but that could be partially due to the newness of some programs.
Williamson, the state P-TECH coordinator in Maryland, said the percentage is expected to grow as additional cohorts complete the full six-year cycle that students are given to complete the program.
P-TECH in Prince George’s County costs about $602,250 for 207 students – or $2,909 per student – and is financed through state and local funds, and grants called “supplemental college grants,” state reports show. The district’s corporate partners are MedStar and Six Flags. Seventy-five students had paid internships.
Notably, the number who were employed after the program was not available. The absence of this key piece of data is conspicuous given that P-TECH bills itself as a program that connects students to “high-wage, in-demand career opportunities.”
A 2023 report identified the need to work more with industry to provide internships and mentoring opportunities and to do a better job of making sure that the P-TECH experience has relevance in the labor market.
“Industry needs and roles may not directly align to secondary and postsecondary educational systems and may require additional collaboration between each partner to ensure a robust and quality early college program, with direct connection to the workforce,” a 2023 state report on P-TECH states.
The true test of the program, then, will not necessarily be how many more students enroll in college and complete their postsecondary degrees as a result. The true test of the program will be the extent to which it actually helps students land jobs in the fields that they studied in college – or at least land the kind of job that makes all the hard work pay off.
