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What Happens to Students Who Take Community College Dual Enrollment Courses in High School?

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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.

Who published it
CCRC, 2017
Authors
John Fink, Davis Jenkins, and Takeshi Yanagiura
What it is
Research report
Where the data comes from
National

What it found

  • 88% of these students continued in college after high school, and only 12% had not enrolled anywhere by age 20.
  • Nearly half went straight to a community college, and 84% of those returned to the same college where they had taken their dual enrollment courses.
  • Among those who started at a community college, 46% earned a credential within five years, ranging from 28% in West Virginia to 64% in Florida.
  • Among those who started at a four-year college, 64% earned a credential within five years, ranging from 34% in Nevada to 75% in Florida.

What it does not show

  • The report cannot say dual enrollment caused any of this. It compares these students against national averages rather than against similar students who skipped the courses.
  • Clearinghouse records do not show which courses students took, how they were taught, or whether the credits ever counted toward a degree.

How the study was done

More than 200,000 students who first took a community college course in fall 2010, tracked in National Student Clearinghouse records through summer 2016. Descriptive, reported state by state.

Why this matters to a family

How likely a dual enrollment student is to finish a degree depends heavily on which state they live in, so the cheerful national figure is not your figure.

Sources

Rules change. These were checked September 2026. Confirm the current version with your school before you act on any of it.

About FastTrack Advising

. FastTrack Advising works on dual enrollment and nothing else. We help families choose college courses a high schooler can take now that will still count toward the degree later, we check every course against the transfer rules of the colleges they name, and we stay in the picture through registration so the plan gets used. When the answer for a student is to wait a term, we say that too.

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.

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