Thinking & Advocacy
With high school graduation season just behind us, another class is taking its next steps. For more than 60% of those graduates, further education is on the immediate horizon. Increasingly, many of those students are arriving with college credits already on their transcripts, thanks to dual enrollment.
Dual enrollment has become a mainstream strategy and a crucial element of the overall college enrollment mix. About one-third of high school students have taken at least one dual enrollment course before graduation, and high school students now account for more than one out of every five community college enrollments.
As dual enrollment has expanded, so have expectations for what it should accomplish. Legislation and local partnership agreements cite a broad range of goals: increasing college access, improving degree completion, accelerating time to degrees, addressing workforce needs, and making college more affordable. However, some of the policies governing dual enrollment are now decades-old, and many of the intended outcomes are not paired with clear measures of success.
For students and families, the promise seems straightforward. College credits earned in high school should reduce costs and accelerate momentum toward a credential and a career. But questions remain: Will those credits transfer? Will they apply to students’ intended pathways? Will they actually shorten the time to a degree? And how much additional value comes from accumulating more credits?
Those questions matter not only for students and families but also for states and school districts contributing considerable resources to dual enrollment. With 2.8 million students participating each year, the total cost of dual enrollment is almost certainly billions of dollars. As participation grows, so does the need to ask a simple question: What is this investment buying us?
In May, our friends at the Community College Research Center (CCRC) released a new report examining postsecondary outcomes for dual enrollment students in four states (Velasco et al., 2026). The report looks at college enrollment, credential completion rates, and time to bachelor’s completion, broken down by the number of credits earned, gateway course completion, and college completion in high school. While the data are limited to public, in-state institutions in four states, it offers findings that deserve attention from policymakers and parents alike.
The data indicate increased rates of college enrollment and completion and decreased time to completion for almost every group of dual enrollment students, but the relative rates of increase and decrease for the outcomes in question merit close examination. For example, in one state, the difference in college completion rates between students who earned 6+ college credits and students who earn 24+ college credits was only one percentage point. Further, across most student groups, the time to a bachelor’s degree was decreased by less than 10% — a difference that equals less than a single semester for a four-year period.
The data here don’t undermine the value of dual enrollment. They clearly indicate positive long-term outcomes for students. But they also provide questions for reasonable people to consider regarding the incremental value of credit accrual for dual enrollment students: Do dual enrollment credits alone have intrinsic value? Is participation really the end goal? Or should another purpose drive design?
The CCRC findings reinforce a broader question that many states are now asking: If dual enrollment continues to expand, how should policy evolve to maximize its impact? For the past 18 months, the College in High School Alliance (CHSA) a national coalition that advances policies to strengthen dual enrollment, has been working with seven states — Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington — to advance the “Next Phase of Dual Enrollment Policy” (Perry, 2023). Achieving the Dream has been proud to coach the Minnesota, Ohio, and Oregon teams as they work to implement policy that goes beyond simply expanding dual enrollment to ensuring dual enrollment has a clear purpose other than the accrual of credits.
The first priority for each of the seven participating states has been to establish a statewide vision for dual enrollment. Although many educators and administrators may be wary of the time and effort needed for a visioning process, the need is real. As investment in dual enrollment grows, states will increasingly ask the question: What are we getting for our investment? And a meaningful response to that question requires states (and institutions) to first define: What outcomes are we trying to achieve? While each state’s context differs, participants are grappling with the same fundamental question: How should policy, funding, and practice align around clearly defined outcomes?
Different Purposes Lead to Different Systems
As participation expands, states and institutions must be explicit about what they are trying to accomplish. Different goals require different system designs.
If the goal is expanding access, model design should prioritize broad participation and support for student populations who are underrepresented in higher education. If the goal is meeting local workforce needs, the design might emphasize career pathways and employer partnerships. And, if the goal is increasing degree attainment, the design may focus on advising and transferability. For institutions, if the goal is strengthening the enrollment pipeline, the design likely needs greater attention to building a sense of belonging for and outreach to students who are not already college-bound.
While state policy must align accountability with investments, individual institutions must also be able to assess what the college and the community are getting from dual enrollment. Without that clarity, they cannot know whether dual enrollment is delivering the outcomes they value most.
For many Achieving the Dream colleges, the question is: How does dual enrollment contribute to the institution’s role in fostering community vibrancy — strengthening local economies, expanding opportunity, and improving quality of life for the communities they serve?
In Texas, ATD has supported a cohort of colleges in a professional learning community focused on crafting pathways from high school, through college, and into high-demand health care pathways. Temple College and local districts are intentionally aligning pathways with regional labor market demand, designing college readiness programs in the early grades, and extending through postsecondary education and employment. Regular collaboration among college teams, school district leaders, university partners, and employers helps align curriculum, monitor student progress, and strengthen transitions, creating pathways that support both student success and the college’s enrollment and workforce goals.
At Bakersfield College in California, Early College Partnerships are built into the high school experience with intention, and more than 50% of dual enrollment students matriculate to Bakersfield after high school graduation. This is not achieved by simply enrolling students in college classes. The Senior Matriculation program is a carefully designed effort that puts college personnel on the high school campus each fall to help seniors complete the application process so that when the college staff return in the spring, students are eligible for priority registration (Bakersfield College, n.d.).
Ultimately, the measures of success should reflect the purpose of the program. If the goal is expanding college access, then participation rates across all demographic groups matter. If the purpose is affordability, then credit applicability and reduced debt matter. If the purpose is workforce development, then employment outcomes matter. And if the purpose is to increase degree attainment, then completion and transfer become the critical measures.
Without clarity about purpose, accountability systems are left measuring what is easiest — credit accumulation and participation — rather than what matters most. In doing so, we are confusing activity with impact.
Dual enrollment is one of the nation’s largest investments in postsecondary education and an increasingly central part of the student experience. As participation continues to grow, states and institutions will answer the question of purpose differently. Some may prioritize workforce development. Others may emphasize affordability, bachelor’s attainment, or strengthening the transition from high school to college.
Whatever the objective, purpose should drive design, funding, and accountability.
As dual enrollment enters its next phase, perhaps the most important question states and institutions can ask is a simple one: What is this investment buying us?
The answer should shape what we build next.
Want to see what purpose-driven dual enrollment looks like in practice? ATD’s 2026 K–College Institute, July 21–23 in San Antonio, Texas, will feature workshops and panel discussions with colleges, K–12 partners, state agencies, employers, and community organizations that are designing dual enrollment systems around shared goals. Learn more.
References
Bakersfield College. (n.d.). High school seniors https://www.bakersfieldcollege.edu/enrollment-aid/outreach/high-school-seniors.html
Perry, A. (2023). The next phase of dual enrollment policy: A vision for the field. College in High School Alliance. https://collegeinhighschool.org/resources/next-phase-of-dual-enrollment-policy/
Velasco, T., Sparks, D., Schudde, L., Levin, E., Lin, Y., Ryu, W., & Fink, J. (2026). Dual enrollment momentum metrics: College enrollment, credential completion, and time to degree. Community College Research Center. https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/dual-enrollment-momentum-metrics.html