Dual enrollment at Northern Virginia Community College, explained for parents

Which of the three tracks is your teen on?

Contract dual enrollment is a NOVA course taught at the high school during the regular school day by a high school teacher NOVA has credentialed as an adjunct. Because the school division holds the contract, the student pays no tuition. Independent dual enrollment is a NOVA course taken on campus or online, and the family is responsible for all tuition and associated fees. College and Career Ready Virginia is a statewide program that pays tuition for eligible juniors and seniors.

The three tracks are not interchangeable. A course that exists at the high school under contract is free; the same subject taken online as an independent student is billed. So the first question is not which course your teen wants, it is whether the high school already offers it, because the answer changes the price by several hundred dollars.

NOVA is Virginia's first dual enrollment program accredited by the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, which is the body that audits whether a course taught in a high school classroom is genuinely the college's course. For a parent looking at a contract course, that accreditation is the reason to treat it as college work rather than as an honors class with a label.

Eligibility is described as qualified juniors and seniors, with exceptional freshmen or sophomores considered. Everyone has to show college readiness the way the Virginia Community College System defines it, which NOVA reads off a current transcript with a cumulative GPA, PSAT, SAT, ACT, or Virginia Placement Test scores, AP score reports, and any course-specific prerequisite, which bite hardest in English, math, and science.

What does College and Career Ready Virginia pay for?

Tuition, at no cost to students, for juniors and seniors who are already NOVA dual enrollment students and attend one of eight school divisions: Alexandria City, Arlington, Fairfax County, Falls Church City, Loudoun County, Manassas City, Manassas Park City, and Prince William County. Private school students and homeschooled students are not eligible for this track.

The program is built around two credentials rather than around loose courses. The Passport is 16 credits at NOVA and the Uniform Certificate of General Studies is 31, and both are designed so that every course inside them transfers to Virginia public universities as general education. Course fees are generally covered by the high school or the division, and textbooks and materials are the family's.

There is a ceiling of three NOVA Online classes per semester through CCRV. Fall 2026 courses run September 22 to December 14, 2026, and the declaration for fall 2026 opened May 1, 2026. Declaring is its own step, done by submitting the NOVA CCRV Declaration in the dual enrollment portal, and a student who skips it is simply not in the program.

Grades from CCRV courses are official and land on the college transcript, which is the sentence families skim past. A free course and a course that costs $700 leave exactly the same permanent record.

What does an independent course cost, and how many can a student take?

For fall 2026, spring 2027, and summer 2027, a Virginia resident pays $232.05 per credit, made up of $202.05 in tuition, a $4.00 student activities fee, a $3.50 auxiliary services fee, and a $22.50 NOVA All Access fee. A student who is not a Virginia resident pays $480.40 per credit, which adds a $28.50 capital fee on top of a higher tuition rate. Those rates followed a State Board decision on May 21, 2026.

Run the arithmetic on a three-credit course before you agree to it. In state that is about $696 for one class, which is still a fraction of what the same course costs at a university, and out of state it is roughly $1,441. Career and technical course-specific fees set by the Virginia Community College System are charged per credit hour on selected courses beginning in fall 2026, so a lab or shop course can carry more than the headline rate.

NOVA's academic load policy allows a dual enrollment student up to 18 credits in a semester. Going past 18 takes an academic overload request and a GPA of 3.0 or better on the most recent 12 college credits or full-time semester. Eighteen credits is a full college schedule, and almost no high school student should be near it.

What are the forms, and who registers the student?

NOVA does. Dual enrollment students cannot self-enroll, and all registrations are processed by the Office of Dual Enrollment. That removes the race for a seat that catches families at other colleges, and it adds a processing queue, so the forms go in early rather than the week classes start.

A student at a public or private high school files Form 125-207, which carries a parent or guardian signature and a high school counselor signature. A homeschooled student files Form 125-208 with a parent or guardian signature. Either way the recommendation form and the eligibility documents are resubmitted every semester, so last fall's paperwork does not carry your teen into spring.

On the contract side the path runs through the school: talk with a parent and the counselor, confirm eligibility and course prerequisites, complete the free NOVA application before the division's deadline, take the student ID and build a profile in the dual enrollment portal, then finish the dual enrollment virtual orientation by the end of the first week of classes. Division deadlines differ, which is why the counselor is the right person to ask for a date rather than the college.

The counselor signature is the piece we tell Northern Virginia families to get moving on first, because it sits between two things the family controls, and it is the step most likely to sit in an inbox during a busy week in May.

Where does NOVA credit count?

Virginia writes its transfer rules into statute, which makes this steadier than in most states. Section 23.1-907 of the Code of Virginia directs the board of visitors of each public baccalaureate institution to develop articulation, dual admissions, and guaranteed admissions agreements with each associate-degree-granting public institution, and it says those agreements may cover students who earn an associate degree concurrently with a high school diploma. Dual enrollment students are named in the law rather than tolerated by it.

The same section creates the two credentials CCRV is built around and gives them their force: each course in the Passport and the Uniform Certificate of General Studies is transferable and satisfies a lower-division general education requirement at any Virginia public institution of higher education. NOVA publishes the Passport at 16 credits and the certificate at 31. A receiving university can ask the State Council of Higher Education for a waiver, and it has to name the specific pathway or degree and show the requirement involves a specialized lower-division course the community college system does not offer. That is a narrow exception with paperwork attached, which is what a real guarantee looks like.

Above the certificates sits the degree. NOVA's Associate of Arts and Associate of Science are designed to transfer to a four-year college or university. The applied degrees, the Associate of Applied Arts and Associate of Applied Science, are not typically designed to transfer, so a family choosing between them is choosing between a job credential and a transfer credential, and both are legitimate ends.

Two tools do the checking. The Transfer Virginia portal at transfervirginia.org holds the statewide agreements and the pathway maps that section 23.1-907 requires institutions to publish, showing the recommended sequence of courses for a given major at a given university. NOVA also runs ADVANCE, a partnership with George Mason University that gives NOVA students personalized support toward a bachelor's degree, and Credits2Careers for students pointing at work rather than a university.

Outside Virginia's public institutions the statute stops. A private college in Virginia and any university in another state each decide for themselves, and NOVA's own transfer pages point students at individual agreements rather than at a blanket promise. If the list of target schools includes one of those, check the specific course with that school's admissions office in eleventh grade, while there is still time to substitute.

Questions to ask before registering

Bring these to the college's dual enrollment office and to the high school counselor. The answers decide most of the plan.

• Does our high school already offer this course under contract, or would my teen be paying for it as an independent student?
• Is our division one of the eight in College and Career Ready Virginia, and has my teen filed the declaration?
• Which form does my teen need, 125-207 or 125-208, and who signs it this semester?
• Is the plan pointed at the 16-credit Passport, the 31-credit certificate, or an associate degree?
• What does the Transfer Virginia pathway map say for this major at the universities on our list?
• What happens to the college transcript if my teen withdraws from a contract course mid-year?

Frequently asked

Is NOVA dual enrollment free?

A contract course taught at the high school is, because the school division holds the contract. An independent course on campus or online is billed at the regular rate, $232.05 a credit in state for 2026-27. CCRV covers tuition for juniors and seniors in eight divisions.

How much does NOVA cost per credit for a dual enrollment student?

For 2026-27, $232.05 per credit for a Virginia resident and $480.40 for a non-resident, including the student activities, auxiliary services, and NOVA All Access fees. Selected career and technical courses add a course-specific fee per credit hour from fall 2026.

Who can take dual enrollment at NOVA?

Qualified juniors and seniors, with exceptional freshmen and sophomores considered. Every student shows college readiness the way the Virginia Community College System defines it, using a transcript GPA, PSAT, SAT, ACT, or Virginia Placement Test scores, AP results, and course prerequisites.

What is College and Career Ready Virginia at NOVA?

A statewide program covering tuition for juniors and seniors in eight participating school divisions who are already NOVA dual enrollment students. It is built around the 16-credit Passport and the 31-credit Uniform Certificate of General Studies, with three NOVA Online classes a semester as the ceiling.

Do NOVA dual enrollment credits transfer to Virginia universities?

Passport and Uniform Certificate of General Studies courses are transferable by statute and satisfy a lower-division general education requirement at any Virginia public institution. Private colleges and out-of-state universities decide on their own.