Dual enrollment research, in plain language

Does it help students finish a degree?

The largest body of evidence, and the one most dual enrollment marketing draws on. Read the method line on each before you read the number.

• What happens after dual enrollment: CCRC 2017

  CCRC, 2017 · What Happens to Students Who Take Community College Dual Enrollment Courses in High School?

  Before this report, most states could tell you how many high school students were sitting in college courses and nothing about what became of them. CCRC matched more than 200,000 of them to National Student Clearinghouse records and followed them for six years. Nearly nine in ten went on to college. The striking part is the spread: among students who started at a community college afterward, the share finishing a credential within five years ran from 28% in one state to 64% in another, and in thirteen states the gap between lower and higher income students was ten points or more.

• Dual enrollment outcomes by state: CCRC 2024

  CCRC, 2024 · The Postsecondary Outcomes of High School Dual Enrollment Students: A National and State-by-State Analysis

  This is the 2017 study redone with a newer cohort and a comparison group. CCRC took every student who entered college for the first time in fall 2015, separated the ones who were still in high school, and followed them four years past their expected graduation. Dual enrollment students went to college at higher rates and finished at higher rates than students who arrived without them. The margin is smaller than most readers expect: 36% of dual enrollees who went straight to college finished a bachelor’s degree in four years, against 34% of those who came in with no dual enrollment at all.

• What Works Clearinghouse on dual enrollment

  WWC, 2017 · Dual Enrollment Programs: WWC Intervention Report

  The What Works Clearinghouse is the U.S. Department of Education’s evidence filter: it reads the research on a program, throws out the studies whose design cannot support a causal claim, and reports what is left. On dual enrollment it kept five studies covering 77,249 students. Those five showed positive effects on college degree attainment, college enrollment, credit accumulation, high school completion, and high school grades. They showed no discernible effect on how well students did academically once they were in college.

• Does dual enrollment help low-income students?

  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 2013 · The Impact of Dual Enrollment on College Degree Attainment: Do Low-SES Students Benefit?

  Dual enrollment is sold partly as a way to widen the door for students whose families cannot absorb four years of tuition. An set out to test whether it does. Using a national longitudinal survey and matching participants to similar non-participants, he found meaningful gains in degree attainment, concentrated among low-income and first-generation students. The detail worth carrying away is about dose: students who earned a single course of credit showed little advantage, while students who earned two courses were 12 percentage points more likely to finish a bachelor’s degree.

• Dual enrollment in Florida and New York City

  CCRC, 2007 · The Postsecondary Achievement of Participants in Dual Enrollment: An Analysis of Student Outcomes in Two States

  This is the study that most dual enrollment brochures are quoting, usually without saying so. The authors used complete state records for two Florida graduating classes and City University of New York records for the College Now program, then controlled for demographics, high school grades, and school characteristics. Participants were more likely to finish high school, more likely to enroll in college, more likely to persist, and earned higher college grades. In New York City the effects showed up only for students who took two or more courses.

• Dual enrollment and time to degree in New York

  New Directions for Higher Education, 2012 · Does Dual Enrollment Increase Students' Success in College? Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Analysis of Dual Enrollment in New York City

  Allen and Dadgar evaluated College Now, the City University of New York dual enrollment program, and looked past the obvious result. Yes, students who earn credits in high school need fewer of them later. But the authors found a second mechanism: students who had taken a College Now course went on to take more college courses per term once they enrolled. Time to degree fell for both reasons at once, and grade point averages came out higher.

• Dual enrollment and remedial classes in Tennessee

  Community College Review, 2017 · The Answer Is Yes: Dual Enrollment Benefits Students at the Community College

  Most dual enrollment research follows students to four-year universities. This one stays at the community college, where the majority of dual enrollment actually happens. The authors matched 1,232 students who enrolled at a northeast Tennessee community college between 2008 and 2012, comparing those who had taken dual enrollment in high school against those who had not. Dual enrollment students landed in remedial courses far less often and graduated on time far more often.

Do the credits count toward a degree later?

Earning a credit and having it apply to a degree are separate events, and both studies here are sobering about the gap between them.

• Transfer students lose 43% of their credits

  GAO, 2017 · Higher Education: Students Need More Information to Help Reduce Challenges in Transferring College Credits

  Congress asked the Government Accountability Office how much college credit disappears when a student changes schools. The answer, from federal longitudinal data on students who transferred between 2004 and 2009, was 43% on average. The loss was smallest between two public institutions and nearly total from a for-profit college to a public one. GAO also reviewed college websites and found most published a transfer policy without publishing the list of schools they had agreements with, which is the part a family would need to plan around.

• What happens to dual enrollment credits later

  AERA Open, 2024 · Earned Credit Could be Lost Credit

  Richardson and Knight did something almost nobody does: they pulled transcripts and degree audits from both the sending and the receiving institution and traced each individual credit from high school through to a bachelor’s degree. Following 60 engineering transfer students in Virginia, they found credit falling out of the pathway at every stage, including at the very start. More than half of the AP and dual enrollment credit these students earned in high school was never used toward anything. The credits that survived were the ones the degree actually required.

Does it matter how the course is taught?

Where the course meets and how many a student takes both show up in the results. The single randomized trial on this page sits here.

• Dual enrollment vs AP: what Florida data show

  National Center for Postsecondary Research, 2011 · Determinants of Students' Success: The Role of Advanced Placement and Dual Enrollment Programs

  Speroni asked which of the two ways to earn college credit in high school predicts better outcomes, using complete records for two Florida graduating classes. Dual enrollment students were more likely to go to college; AP students were more likely to start at a four-year institution. By the time anyone finished a bachelor’s degree the difference had mostly closed. The finding that changed how people read this literature is buried in the detail: the entire dual enrollment effect came from courses taken at the community college campus. Students who took dual enrollment only inside their own high school did no better than students who took neither program.

• The one randomized trial of dual credit

  Annenberg Institute at Brown University, 2019 · Dual-Credit Courses and the Road to College: Experimental Evidence from Tennessee

  Every other study on this page compares students who chose dual enrollment with students who did not, which leaves open the possibility that the students were different all along. This one does not have that problem. Working with the Tennessee Department of Education, the authors randomly assigned 103 high schools to offer a new dual-credit advanced algebra course or not. The course changed what students took next: less remedial math, more precalculus and AP math. It did not change whether they went to college at all, though it did pull some of them from two-year colleges toward four-year universities.

• RAND on Texas dual credit: what it found

  RAND Corporation, 2017 · Dual Credit Education in Texas: Interim Report

  Texas grew its dual credit program 650% in fifteen years and then asked RAND whether it was working. The first phase combined state administrative records from 2000 to 2015 with interviews and surveys of the people running the programs. Dual credit students had better college outcomes on every measure and finished four-year degrees about half an academic year faster. RAND was careful to say what the analysis could not support: with descriptive data, it cannot conclude that dual credit caused the difference, and its own headline recommendation was to wait for the next phase before changing policy.

How many students take these courses?

The federal counts, and what they say about where the courses happen.

• Understanding dual enrollment: a CCRC fact sheet

  CCRC, 2026 · Understanding Dual Enrollment

  CCRC gathers two decades of dual enrollment research onto one page and answers the size question first. Dual enrollment is now ordinary: more than 2.8 million students took a college course in high school in 2023-24, four in five high schools offer it, and about a third of students take at least one before they graduate. The fact sheet is equally plain about who is missing. White students take these courses at close to twice the rate of their Black and Hispanic classmates, and English learners and students with disabilities are further behind than either group.

• How many students take dual enrollment?

  NCES, 2019 · Dual Enrollment: Participation and Characteristics

  The National Center for Education Statistics followed a nationally representative group of students from ninth grade in 2009 and read their high school transcripts. About a third of them took at least one course for college credit. The more useful half of the report is about where and who. Four out of five took the course inside their own high school, and participation tracked closely with how much education their parents had, which is the first sign that access is not evenly spread.

Who gets in, and who is left out?

Access is decided locally, and the research on closing the gap is about practice rather than policy.

• What strong dual enrollment programs do

  CCRC, 2023 · DEEP Insights: Redesigning Dual Enrollment as a Purposeful Pathway to College and Career Opportunity

  CCRC went looking for partnerships that had managed to reach Black, Hispanic, and low-income students at scale, then described what those places were doing differently. Four practices came up across all six sites: they recruited students who would never have applied on their own, they lined the course offerings up with real degree and career paths, they gave students advising while still in high school, and they put instructional support behind the courses. The report is a description of good practice rather than a test of it, which makes it most useful as a list of questions to put to your own school.

• The DEEP framework for dual enrollment

  CCRC, 2024 · Dual Enrollment Equity Pathways: A Research-Based Framework for Expanding College and Career Opportunity for Underserved Students

  This is the framework the field now argues about. Griffin and colleagues interviewed staff at six community colleges and twelve partner high schools and set out four practice areas that distinguish a deliberate dual enrollment program from a course catalogue. The target of the argument is what the authors call à la carte dual enrollment, where a student picks one course at a time with nothing connecting them. The framework treats that as the default and the problem, and proposes recruiting, alignment to a program of study, early advising, and supported instruction as the fix.

• Who gets into dual enrollment, by district

  CCRC, 2019 · Acceleration for All? Mapping Racial Equity in Access to AP and Dual Enrollment

  CCRC took federal civil rights data covering every school district in the country and mapped who was actually sitting in AP and dual enrollment courses. The headline is the variation. In about a quarter of districts, White students participate at rates seven to ten points above their Black and Hispanic classmates or worse. In another quarter the gap is under two points, and roughly one in five districts has no gap at all. Overall participation rates run from under 4% of students to over 20%, sometimes between neighbouring districts in the same state.

What does it cost, and who pays?

Two state audits, from the two states that have looked hardest at their own programs.

• Georgia dual enrollment audit and HB 444

  Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, 2020 · Follow-Up Review: Dual Enrollment Program, Report No. 19-31

  Georgia’s auditors examined the state’s dual enrollment program in 2018 and found a program spending heavily with no defined goals, no single agency responsible for its data, and no access to the course records needed to verify what it was paying for. This 2020 follow-up checks what happened next. House Bill 444 wrote goals into statute, made the Georgia Student Finance Commission responsible for collecting and evaluating the data, and controlled costs by limiting who qualifies and how many hours the state will fund.

• Minnesota PSEO: the 1996 legislative audit

  Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor, 1996 · Postsecondary Enrollment Options Program

  Minnesota invented statewide dual enrollment in 1985, and ten years in, the Legislative Auditor took the program apart. The evaluation surveyed nearly every high school principal in the state, surveyed participants and their parents, and worked out where the money went. Families saved close to $11 million in a single year. Participation was tiny by today’s standards and wildly uneven: in some high schools nearly a third of juniors and seniors took part, and 48 districts reported nobody at all.

What do the state rules look like?

One reference work, kept state by state.

• Dual enrollment policy in all 50 states

  ECS, 2022 · 50-State Comparison: Dual/Concurrent Enrollment Policies

  Dual enrollment is not one program, it is roughly sixty of them, and this is the reference work that keeps track. The Education Commission of the States reads the statute, regulation, and board rule in every state and sorts what it finds into program basics, access, courses, finance, and quality. Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia have a state-level policy, and twenty-eight of them run more than one program. The comparison is the fastest way to see that the answer to almost any dual enrollment question changes at the state line.

How to read a study on this page

Four habits will keep you from being sold something on the strength of a number that does not support it.

• Read the method line before the finding. A result from one community college in one state is worth having, and it is not a national rate.
• Ask what the comparison group is. Most of these studies compare students who signed up for dual enrollment against students who did not, and the two groups differed before anybody took a course.
• Check the year the data end. Several of the best-known studies follow students who were in high school before 2010, and the programs have grown many times over since.
• Separate credits earned from credits that count. A study of degree completion is not a study of credit transfer, and the two tell different stories.