By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Three minutes
Two new resources related to dual enrollment are about to get bookmarked, flagged, or saved in the content repository of your choice. Dual enrollment, broadly a practice in which high school students engage with college-level coursework to earn credit,
has been gaining steam across the country over the past five years.
A new “learning deck” from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation examines the history, current state, and future of dual enrollment. Meanwhile, new research, data, and an accompanying dashboard from the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College, Columbia and the National Student
Clearinghouse Research Center examine dual enrolled students’ postsecondary outcomes.
“We hope that this resource can help you learn about the evidence behind dual enrollment and the open questions about how to make sure it becomes the most effective and equitable tool possible,” write Bill Tucker and Sylvia Symonds from the Gates Foundation,
who led the development of the learning deck. “We have used versions of this deck to onboard new colleagues, to make the case for putting attention and resources toward dual enrollment, and to inform discussions about our own strategies.”
The deck includes the hypothesis that the highest-impact dual enrollment programs do the following:
Help students earn a minimum of 12 transferrable, credit-based courses
Are structured around a program of study that articulates to credentials and leads to career opportunities
Are aligned with a career path of student interest
Have early advising, goal setting, and planning supports
Are offered at no cost to students
The deck notes that “there were 1.5 million dual enrollment students in 2021 — three times more than there were in 2001” and asserts, “There is strong evidence that dual enrollment is a powerful tool to accelerate students—including students who may not
see themselves going to college—toward a postsecondary credential and a career.” It also offers case studies from both California and Texas about successful dual enrollment implementations.
Moving onto the CCRC study, the authors analyze “data on all students who entered a community college or four-year institution for the first time in the fall of 2015” according to whether students were:
Dual enrolled (“high school students who enrolled at a postsecondary institution for the first time ever in fall of 2015, prior to their expected high school completion”)
Prior dual enrolled (“new undergraduates who enrolled at a postsecondary institution in fall 2015, after their expected high school completion, with records of prior postsecondary enrollment while in high school”) or
Non-dual-enrolled (new undergraduates who enrolled at a postsecondary institution for the first ever time in fall 2015, after their expected high school completion, with no prior DE experience”)
The authors identify five key findings:
High school dual enrollment is widespread and growing across states; it is especially prevalent at community colleges.
Dual enrollment students have strong postsecondary outcomes after high school, particularly in some states.
Black, Latino/a, and students from low-income backgrounds are underrepresented in dual enrollment and have lower average award completion rates than dual enrollment students overall. However, low-income, Black, and Latino/a dual enrollees’ award
completion rates are stronger than that of non-dual enrollees.
High school students who take dual enrollment courses at a four-year institution do particularly well in college but are not as diverse as other dual enrollment students in terms of race/ethnicity and neighborhood income.
For community colleges, former dual enrollment students are a strong source of post-high-school enrollments.
The accompanying dashboard will be particularly useful for state audiences. It allows for filtering by state, subgroup, gender, and starting institution type and examines
postsecondary outcomes one year and four years after high school graduation. This is one of the most comprehensive dual enrollment data sets I’ve personally encountered, and it will be handy for both reference and advocacy purposes.
Beyond these resources, National College Attainment Network (NCAN) monitor the provisioning of equitable dual enrollment opportunities as a state policy lever. We categorize states according to whether high schools are required to provide these opportunities and whether states contribute to their cost. The current map according to these categories appears below.
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