More than half of North Carolina’s public high school graduates completed at least one college-level course or exam while still in high school last year, state education officials announced April 2. That percentage is the highest ever recorded.
The 54% figure, drawn from the class of 2025, includes students who passed Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate, Cambridge International, or Career and College Promise (CCP) dual enrollment courses.
Superintendent of public instruction Mo Green presented the data to the State Board of Education alongside three other records announced in recent months: an 88% four-year graduation rate, record AP performance, and nearly 383,000 industry-recognized credentials earned by Career and Technical Education (CTE) students in a single year.
“North Carolina, you should take a bow,” Green told the board. “These are historic results for North Carolina’s public schools.”
Despite the positive trend in the numbers, some critics are urging caution.
“While these achievements show a positive trend, they must be taken in context,” said Bryce Fiedler, director of the Carolinas Academic Leadership Network. “Recent changes to AP exam scoring have fueled a well-documented nationwide spike in passing scores across several subjects. Moreover, graduation rates in themselves are not necessarily an indicator of college and career readiness. Dual enrollment performance is, however, one of the more meaningful measures of future success.”
The CCP program, which allows high school students to enroll simultaneously in college courses at community colleges and four-year institutions, drove much of that growth. Thirty-eight percent of 2025 graduates — roughly 87,000 students — enrolled in at least one dual enrollment course through CCP, also an all-time high and a 10% increase over the prior year, according to the new data.
Green pointed to the state’s 138 Cooperative Innovative High Schools (CIHS), known as early colleges, as a particular point of distinction. These schools are located on community college and university campuses and offer a hybrid high school-college experience starting in ninth grade, at no tuition cost to families.
“North Carolina is not just following the national early college movement — we are leading it,” Green said. “North Carolina has more early college high schools than any other state in America.”
Of the 6,560 students who graduated from a CIHS in 2024-25, more than half earned an associate degree alongside their high school diploma. Those students now enter four-year colleges as juniors, Green said, with an economic head start that is particularly significant for first-generation college students.
Sneha Shah-Coltrane, senior director for the Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Advanced Learning & Gifted Education, also noted that graduates of CCP have improved earning potential. Students in the college transfer pathway earned 7% higher cumulative wages than peers, while those in the CTE pathway were more likely to be employed with 14% higher cumulative wages, according to research conducted by the RAND Corporation and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
“This program is especially powerful for first-generation college students and has the ability to drive economic mobility for families across our state,” Shah-Coltrane said in a statement.
Green said the state is aiming to reach 100% participation in college-level coursework and intends for NC to be best in the nation by 2030.