The Impact of Dual Enrollment on College Degree Attainment: Do Low-SES Students Benefit?
On this page
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.
- Who published it
- Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 2013
- Authors
- Brian P. An
- What it is
- Peer-reviewed study
- Where the data comes from
- National
What it found
- Dual enrollment participation raised the chance of earning any postsecondary degree by 8 percentage points, and a bachelor’s degree by 7 percentage points.
- First-generation students who took dual enrollment earned a degree at a rate 8 percentage points higher than first-generation students who did not.
- Students who earned three credits, one course, showed little advantage. Students who earned six credits were 12 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree.
- Expanding dual enrollment would narrow the attainment gap between income groups only modestly.
What it does not show
- The survey asked about dual enrollment only among students who went on to college, so the study cannot speak to students who never enrolled.
- The main data follow students who were eighth graders in 1988, and both the programs and the students have changed since.
How the study was done
Propensity score matching on the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, with 8,800 students, checked against a 2004 cohort of college freshmen.
Why this matters to a family
Two courses look different from one in this data, so a single elective taken to see how it goes is unlikely to change where your teen lands.
Sources
Rules change. These were checked September 2026. Confirm the current version with your school before you act on any of it.
Reading the evidence before a decision?
Save this page and it sits on your own My FastTrack page alongside your state's deadlines and the tools. Deciding which of these findings apply to one teen, in one state, aiming at particular colleges, is what a roadmap engagement settles.