1,305 Dallas students earned a college degree before finishing high school — a new record

In Dallas, the line between high school and college keeps dissolving. In the 2025-26 school year, a record 1,305 Dallas ISD students earned associate degrees before graduating from high school — more than double the 628 who managed it in 2020 — and 1,376 earned either a degree or more than 60 college credit hours. The engine is a network of 19 P-TECH programmes and seven Early College High Schools, where students take real college coursework alongside their high school classes. Every credit banked early is tuition a family will never have to pay and a semester a student will never have to repeat. The district's own table tells the story of a habit becoming a system: the degree count has climbed almost every year for six years.

SDG 4 · Quality education — Mechanism: institutional program