Frontier Evidence on How Dual Enrollment Benefits Students and Communities: Evidence from States and National Data.

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Over the past decades, dual enrollment (DE)—students taking college-level coursework while in high school—has expanded dramatically, with over 2.5 million students participating nationwide by 2023 (IPEDS, 2025; Fink, 2025). This growth has been accompanied by variation in policy implementation and practices across states, raising questions about which types of courses and practices are most effective at supporting student success, and about the downstream consequences for colleges and communities investing in DE.

While prior research has documented the positive effects of DE participation on student outcomes (e.g., Giani et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2022; Lee & Villarreal, 2022), and some studies have examined the impact of more structured modalities—such as early college high school models (Atchison, Mohammed, Zeiser, Knight, & Levin, 2019; Berger et al., 2013; Song et al., 2021)—there is a growing need for evidence on the types of courses and content that are most effective at supporting students who need it most, the kinds of high school–college partnerships that yield the strongest student outcomes, and the aggregate nationwide consequences of DE participation for postsecondary enrollment and success among communities.

This panel addresses these gaps in the literature with four papers using data from diverse policy contexts:

• “Dual Enrollment Participation among Career and Technical Students in Delaware” uses administrative data linking students from K–12 through postsecondary education and into the labor market to describe gaps in DE participation among CTE students, coupled with a regression discontinuity design to measure the impact of DE in guiding these students toward postsecondary enrollment—counteracting the predominance of vocational trajectories among CTE students.


• “Making Gains in Math, English, and English as a Second Language through Dual Enrollment in California” examines participation in DE math, English, and ESL courses following the implementation of Assembly Bills 288 and 705—which aimed to improve access to transfer-level math and English—in California, using both quantitative and qualitative data from nine high school graduating cohorts.


• “The Link Between Dual Enrollment Partnership Characteristics and Outcomes” explores DE partnerships between high schools and community colleges in Texas, using administrative data to identify all DE course enrollments across three cohorts of high school students. The authors construct partnership-level measures and outcomes for each unique high school–college pairing. Through descriptive and regression analyses, they examine which DE structures and contexts predict aggregate DE course completion, college enrollment, and degree attainment.


• “Examining the Expansion of Dual Enrollment and the Benefits for Communities and Institutions” uses IPEDS data on fall postsecondary enrollments over the past two decades to analyze how growth in DE drives college enrollment across communities, sectors, and institutions. The authors develop a metric capturing how much of postsecondary enrollment growth is driven by DE and use instrumental variable methods to estimate the effect of DE expansion on communities’ postsecondary outcomes.

Overall, this panel provides insights into the policy and institutional features driving student success, as well as the downstream benefits for communities.

Policy Area

• Education

Chair

• Taylor K. Odle, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Discussants

• Tolani A Britton, University of California, Berkeley

• Lauren Schudde, University of Texas at Austin

Organizer

• Tatiana Velasco, Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• Dual Enrollment Participation among Career and Technical Students in Delaware - Presenting Author: Florence Xiaotao Ran, University of Delaware

• Making Gains in Math, English and English as a Second Language through Dual Enrollment in California - Non-Presenting Co-Author: Rachel Zhou, Public Policy Institute of California; Presenting Author: Hoyun Kim, University of California, Berkeley

• The Link Between Dual-Enrollment Partnership Characteristics and Outcomes - Presenting Author: Wonsun Ryu, University of Texas at Austin

• Examining the Benefits of Dual Enrollment for Communities, Sectors and Institutions - Presenting Author: Mariel R Bedoya, Teachers College, Columbia University