By Lauren Schudde, Jessica Steiger, and Melissa Chavarria
Dual enrollment (DE) students, who earn college credit before graduating from high school, are the fastest-growing student population in higher education. Community colleges enroll the majority of DE students, who now represent about one fifth of their total enrollees. As DE becomes central to community college enrollment, colleges are trying to scale programs while making them more purposeful and equitable. But doing so requires more than policy changes or new memoranda of understanding (MOUs). It requires organizational capacity in K-12 districts and community colleges.
Building that capacity for DE is difficult because K-12 school districts and community colleges are fundamentally different organizations: They answer to different accountability systems, follow different funding formulas, operate on different calendars, and have different regulatory obligations. DE partnerships operate at the boundary between these two siloed organizations—and DE staff are responsible for spanning that boundary.
In a recent study of high-performing DE partnerships in Texas, we interviewed 81 practitioners and leaders at three community colleges and five partner high schools. Where most DE research focuses on policy and practice, our research centered the people who make partnerships function, particularly staff who operate across organizational boundaries.
The workforce of DE personnel is small, spread thin, and often unstable. About half of respondents to a 2023 National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships (NACEP) salary survey reported that at least one employee from their DE program had left in the prior year. NACEP’s executive director described DE programs as being “understaffed and underappreciated based on the complexity” of their work. When DE staff leave their institution or move into another position, their accumulated knowledge, which often holds the partnership together, leaves with them. Given the challenges, how can educational leaders build stronger partnerships?
The four lessons below draw on evidence from our recent working paper, Dual Enrollment as an Interorganizational Field: Defining and Redefining Organizational Boundaries Between High School and College.
1. Champions at the top set the vision and back that vision with real resources.
Every transformative partnership we visited had at least one leader who pushed for the partnership and used their institutional authority to sustain it. Community college presidents and superintendents secured resources, built trust across organizations, and made DE a strategic priority rather than a side initiative. At one college, personnel described a president who “constantly worked with [independent school districts] to get feedback” on how to improve dual enrollment programming. A partner superintendent noted that the college president regularly visited schools throughout the county, invited district leaders to campus, and repeatedly asked, “What can we do better? How can we communicate better?” This visible commitment reinforced trust and signaled that the partnership mattered to the college. At the school district, leaders similarly backed their vision with resources. One superintendent, for example, explicitly “put [DE tuition] in the budget to make it as accessible as possible” and framed the ongoing challenge as figuring out “a way to budget again going forward.”
One of the key tools these champions leverage is the partnership’s MOU. But an MOU is only as strong as the leaders who insist on revisiting and updating it. Our data suggest that partnerships thrive when senior administrators use MOUs not as one-time paperwork but as living documents that keep both organizations accountable to shared goals.
2. Coordinators are the connective tissue—and they need dedicated capacity.
If leaders set the vision, mid-level administrators—DE directors and coordinators at the college, and directors of counseling, college and career readiness, or academies at the high school—function as the connective tissue of the partnership. They run the daily operation. One coordinator at a community college we visited summarized her portfolio as receiving grades and passing them to the high schools, relaying faculty early alerts to high school counselors, scheduling classes, and coordinating with department chairs and deans each semester. There wasn’t a part of the DE process that she didn’t touch.
These roles cannot be another hat worn by an overburdened administrator. When they are, key tasks fall through the cracks and communication breaks down. Partnerships that want to grow DE thoughtfully should hire and retain dedicated DE coordinators at both the college and the district and protect their time for cross-institutional work.
3. Boundary-spanning roles create critical ties between partner schools and colleges.
One of the most powerful practices we observed was designing roles to work across institutions. One college and its partner districts co-employed DE advisors who split their time between college and high school campuses. As a college administrator explained, having dedicated staff “onsite multiple days throughout the week provided students a lot more opportunity to check in,” and produced “much greater use of student hours [and] office hours” than the prior model in which college advisors briefly appeared to register students each term. Other colleges assigned DE staff to regularly spend time at high school partners to advise and support DE students.
Such boundary-spanning roles are also useful for DE instruction, particularly when DE courses are held at the high school. Embedded DE instructors—teachers hired by the high school and credentialed by the college—brought college-level rigor to the high school schedule while remaining attentive to the reality that DE students “are in high school and not just taking [a given] DE class.” At rural high schools relying on online DE, districts assigned facilitators to support students, troubleshoot technology, communicate with instructors, and flag concerns.
4. Cross-sector cooperation cannot be done on the cheap.
A recurring theme in our interviews was that DE requires substantial back-and-forth communication—what one district administrator called the “double work” of guiding students through both high school graduation requirements and college degree pathways. Federal privacy rules for higher education add to the load because DE instructors cannot contact parents directly. Instead, information travels from instructors through DE coordinators, advisors, and high-school counselors before reaching families. This chain works only when every link is staffed.
That is why we caution against the assumption that DE can scale on existing personnel. Only 10 states provide adequate funding for DE programming, leaving college and district partners to cover the remaining costs. Some colleges offset costs by repurposing resources and working to enrolling more former DE students after high school. Sustaining and expanding strong partnerships requires an honest accounting of the human infrastructure it takes to move students, grades, courses, and paperwork across two very different systems.
As dual enrollment continues to grow as a share of community college enrollment, the human and organizational infrastructure to support it must keep pace. Investing in that capacity is the surest way to make DE partnerships work—and keep working—for the students they serve.
