For years, dual enrollment (DE) has been measured with a single yes/no question: did a student participate or not? That binary approach is easy to track and easy to put into an accountability formula, but it treats a student who took one course as equivalent to a student who earned a full associate’s degree in high school—two entirely different experiences collapsed into the same data point. This session makes the case for a more nuanced approach. Latent profile analysis of 3.4 million Texas high school graduates, ~700K of whom completed at least one DE course, identifies five distinct patterns of DE engagement and examines how these patterns vary across demographic groups and school models, such as Early College High Schools. A second paper adds further nuance, examining DE participation in combination with other types of college-and-career acceleration coursework (i.e., Advanced Placement, secondary CTE). Using administrative data on cohorts of Texas high school graduates, the second paper focuses on whether and how accelerated coursework—alone and in combination—explains differences in college degree completion and earnings gains six years after high school. The session closes with a new DE momentum-metrics framework, built from four-state’s longitudinal data, offering colleges forward-looking, reliable indicators for improving DE programs.