Dual Enrollment Leads to More College Acceptances, Greater Financial Awards

Dual enrollment is on the rise. These programs, which allow high school students to take college classes, have existed for seven decades. But in recent years, the number of participants has skyrocketed from 300,000 in the early 2000s to 2.5 million in 2022–23.

As these programs grow to be an increasingly common part of the high school experience and many institutions’ enrollments, researchers are working to understand how they affect students. Previous research has indicated that dual-enrollment participants attend college immediately after high school at higher rates than their peers. And when broken down by race, Black and Hispanic students are more likely to get a bachelor’s in four years if they participated in dual-enrollment programs, though dual enrollees on the whole are not significantly more likely to finish in four years.

Two reports from this year offer more insights. Researchers examined where dual enrollees applied and were admitted to college and what kind of scholarships and grants they received in their first year. Both studies found more positive outcomes for students who had completed dual-enrollment courses—a win for proponents of these programs.

Another new report from the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, the association for institutions with dual-enrollment programs, analyzes just how common it really is for high schoolers to take dual-enrollment courses.

Where Students Apply

A new report from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College highlights new details of how dual-enrollment students fared after high school. The study analyzed data sets for two cohorts of ninth graders—about 500,000 total students—in an unnamed state, finding that those who were enrolled in dual-enrollment programs were more likely to apply and be admitted both to a higher number of colleges and to more selective colleges. Those increases were even larger for Black students, who were 15.6 percent more likely to apply to a four-year institution for each dual-enrollment credit they took.

Vivian Yuen Ting Liu, the study’s lead researcher and associate director of evaluation at the Office of Applied Research, Evaluation & Data Analytics at the City University of New York, said that studies have shown the lower-income students and historically underrepresented students often self-select out of applying to more selective colleges. Her research indicates that dual enrollment can help improve students’ self-confidence in the application process.

“We were thinking, if dual enrollment can help … prepare [students] for college, does that change how they think about the academic match between the college and themself?” she said. “The hope was that if dual enrollment can help this historically underserved group in higher education, maybe this can be a new tool for policymakers to target this population.”

Moving forward, Liu hopes to investigate how different variations of dual enrollment, from which classes students take to whether they take them on a college campus versus at their high school, can further affect their postsecondary outcomes.

Financial Assistance

Students who take dual-enrollment courses are also more likely to receive grants and scholarships than their peers, according to research published in the Journal of Student Financial Aid earlier this year. The report was funded by NACEP.

The study, which reviewed records of 8,690 students who were high school freshmen in 2009, found that those who had completed at least one dual-enrollment course were 1.5 times more likely to receive a scholarship compared those who hadn’t in their first year in college, and 1.7 times more likely to receive a merit scholarship specifically. It also found that the average value of a dual enrollee’s financial assistance was around $1,200 higher than that of a student who did not participate in a dual-enrollment program.

Although that sum isn’t a huge dent in college tuition costs for most students, the report’s author, Xiaodan Hu, an associate professor in the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at Southern Methodist University, argues in the paper that even small scholarships and grants may be enough to incentivize a student to attend college. Additionally, the increased grants and scholarships are compounded with the other financial benefits of taking dual-enrollment courses, which are cheaper than taking the same courses in a traditional college setting. Some dual-enrollment courses are even fully subsidized for low-income students.

Further research is required to figure out how, exactly, colleges evaluate and perceive dual-enrollment participation when doling out aid, Hu said, noting that, while her study shows a relationship between financial assistance and dual enrollment, it doesn’t prove causation.

“Future research really needs to look at if it does boost the student’s academic profile,” she said. “I think that’s one of the motivations for students to take dual-credit courses is to see, ‘Will I be more competitive in getting into a college and getting scholarships?’”

Participation Ranges by State

As dual enrollment continues to grow, nearly half of all public high schoolers in some states are enrolled in college courses.

Those states include Idaho (45 percent) and Indiana (40 percent). Other states with more than 30 percent of public high schoolers participating in dual enrollment are Iowa, Minnesota and Utah. Only five states had participation rates in the single digits.

That’s according to NACEP’s analysis of dual enrollment from 2022–23, the first year for which the federal government collected data on these programs. Previously, the Education Department’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System used age as a proxy for dual-enrollment status, counting those 17 and under who were enrolled in college as dual-enrollment students.

(Although the numbers were released last year, NACEP planned to wait until IPEDS released finalized figures to publish its analysis. Those numbers still haven’t been released, so NACEP chose to move forward with the preliminary data. Mass layoffs at the Education Department earlier this year gutted the office that oversees IPEDS.)

The analysis also showed that one in five students who had completed a dual-enrollment course, or about half a million total students, went through a program accredited by NACEP.

“Earning NACEP accreditation requires programs to undergo a rigorous outside review by a panel of peer institutions and demonstrate they have consistently met the mark of quality practice,” the report states.

Amy Williams, NACEP’s executive director, said it was exciting to have the new data, which her organization had long pushed IPEDS to collect. But it will be most useful once there are a few years’ worth of numbers to analyze.

“This is kind of a big deal for our field because of the benchmarking capability,” she said. “I’m a big fan of longitudinal data. This is just year one.”