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Dual Enrollment Programs: WWC Intervention Report

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On this page

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.

Who published it
WWC, 2017
Authors
What Works Clearinghouse, Institute of Education Sciences
What it is
Research report
Where the data comes from
National

What it found

  • Dual enrollment showed positive effects on college degree attainment, with an average improvement index of 25 percentile points.
  • It showed positive effects on college enrollment, credit accumulation, finishing high school, and high school achievement.
  • It showed no discernible effect on general academic achievement once students were in college.
  • Only five studies met the review’s design standards, two of them without reservations, covering 77,249 high school students.

What it does not show

  • Five qualifying studies is a thin base for a program this large, and three of the five met the standards only with reservations.
  • The review treats dual enrollment as one thing, so it cannot say which program design, which subject, or which state’s rules produced the effect.

How the study was done

A systematic review of dual enrollment research against What Works Clearinghouse group design standards, published February 2017. Five qualifying studies, 77,249 students.

Why this matters to a family

This is the closest thing to an official federal verdict on dual enrollment, and the verdict is that the courses help most with the thing families care about most, finishing a degree.

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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