In the past decade there has been a rapid expansion in the number of high school students enrolling at community colleges through dual enrollment programs. Nearly 2.5 million high school students took a dual enrollment course in the 2022-23 school year, with dual enrollment doubling in size over the previous decade. Because dual enrollment now operates at such a large scale and has been shown to increase college enrollment and completion, it has great potential for increasing college access and success for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students and others who have not been well served in the high school-to-college transition. Yet exclusionary policies, practices, and mindsets have created barriers to entry for these marginalized groups and other potential beneficiaries of dual enrollment programs.
Emerging innovative models illustrate what it takes for dual enrollment to produce more equitable postsecondary success for all students. In 2023, CCRC introduced the dual enrollment equity pathways (DEEP) framework to describe how guided pathways student success reforms can be extended to high school dual enrollment programs to create a more equitable on-ramp to a college program that leads to career-path employment for large numbers of students. And research on the economics of dual enrollment for colleges indicates that taking a DEEP approach can also be in colleges’ financial interest. The DEEP framework includes four areas of practice that build on related research on early college high schools, Aspen and CCRC’s Dual Enrollment Playbook, and CCRC’s guided pathways research.
In the next phase of CCRC’s DEEP work, we are producing research-based guidance, tools, and metrics to support efforts by college and K-12 practitioners to plan, implement, and scale practices aligned with the DEEP framework. We are partnering with intermediary organizations to support the adoption and formative evaluation of DEEP reforms nationally with a particular focus in California, Texas, and Washington. During this three-year project, CCRC and our partners at The University of Texas at Austin will:
- Produce research-based guidance on scaling DEEP practices for the emerging field of college and K-12 reformers working to strengthen dual enrollment as an equitable on-ramp to career-path postsecondary programs after high school;
- Develop data metrics and tools to enable practitioners to plan, implement, evaluate, and improve DEEP practices;
- Conduct field education activities for practitioners in partnership with national, state, and regional intermediaries, including presentations, workshops, and other activities that will help accelerate the scaling of DEEP practices.
Our work to produce research-based guidance will focus on three important unaddressed issues that confront college and K-12 practitioners as they seek to scale DEEP practices: 1) secondary career and technical education as an on-ramp to postsecondary degree programs; 2) transferability to bachelor’s degrees of credits earned through dual enrollment; and 3) community college and K-12 business models to support the scaling of DEEP practices.
This project is funded by the Gates Foundation.