Bridging Systems and Politics

Lillian Pace's 2017 account of the College in High School Alliance, updated with national data on dual enrollment participation and outcomes.

By Lillian PaceJun 2, 20179 min read

High school students taking notes in a college lecture hall college in high school

Dual enrollment reached nearly 2.5 million high school students in 2022-23; here is who takes part and what the outcome research does and does not show.

Lillian Pace of KnowledgeWorks described in 2017 how the College in High School Alliance hoped to expand early college and dual enrollment through federal and state policy. A new section after the article sets out what national data now show about participation and outcomes, and which of the 2017 policy items need checking.

An Alliance Forms to Promote College in High School

Students throughout the U.S. face persistent challenges of postsecondary readiness, access, affordability and completion. Because of these challenges, students often must enroll in remedial courses, drop out before earning a degree or graduate with thousands of dollars of student loan debt.

But there’s a way to address these barriers to postsecondary success while also rethinking our traditional education system. And policymakers, practitioners and education stakeholders are starting to take notice.

Early college high schools and dual and concurrent enrollment break down traditional silos between K-12 and higher education, enabling students to earn postsecondary credit while in high school. Both options put students on a more efficient pathway to college, lower the cost of postsecondary education and reduce the amount of time needed to complete a college degree.

Unfortunately, traditional policy and funding silos have made it challenging to bring these programs to scale.

Fortunately, more than three dozen organizations have joined together to form the College in High School Alliance (CHSA) in an effort to better leverage federal and state policies to support these evidence-based models. Alliance members share the belief that greater support for dual and concurrent enrollment and early college high school programs at the federal, state and local levels will significantly improve the secondary and post-secondary outcomes of students, particularly those from low- and moderate-income backgrounds.

Current Policy Opportunities With a new Presidential Administration and the 115^th Congress well underway, there hasn’t been a shortage of opportunities to promote policies that advance these evidence-based models. Additionally, enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has generated significant activity at the state level as policymakers work to craft new plans for implementation of the law. Here is an overview of opportunities on the federal level to expand early college and dual and concurrent enrollment opportunities throughout the country. Here are some policy initiatives that can support students in earning college credit in high school:

ESSA State Plans – ESSA empowers states and local decision-makers to implement the strategies they choose for improving teaching and learning, provided they are grounded in evidence of success. Because of this, there is a unique opportunity to create more early college high school and dual and concurrent enrollment opportunities for students. As states collaborate with stakeholders to design new education systems that comply with ESSA, CHSA is working to elevate opportunities in the new law to expand and scale dual and concurrent enrollment and early college high school programs. We released guidance and recommendations to states aligned to these opportunities in ESSA and we continue to track and engage with states as they release public drafts of their state plans for comment. CHSA hopes to serve as an ongoing resource to states throughout plan development and implementation to expand high-quality postsecondary pathway options for students.

U.S. Department of Education (ED) Pell Experimental Site – Building on the 2016 launch of ED’s Experimental Site to provide Pell Grants to high school students in 43 participating dual enrollment programs, CHSA has engaged in advocacy with the new presidential administration and Congress to support the evaluation of this experiment as well as expansion to additional sites. This experiment has the potential to inform national conversations about how to provide financial stability for school models that straddle the K-12 and higher education systems. We hope to see this work continue so we may learn valuable lessons about the experiment’s impact on institutions, financial aid systems and student participation and success.

Editor’s note (2026): The Education Department’s 2016 announcement lists 44 participating institutions.

Perkins Reauthorization – With legislative activity underway to reauthorize the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, the CHSA has convened a working group of its members to develop a set of recommendations for advancement of dual and concurrent enrollment and early college high school programs in the law. We continue to engage with congressional champions to help advance these recommendations, providing relevant information to guide the policymaking process. Some of the most impactful early college high school and dual enrollment programs are part of a career and technical education pathway. Greater funding flexibility and alignment for these programs within the goals of the nation’s federal career and technical education law would help ensure that more students benefit from these evidence based models.

HEA Reauthorization – Similarly, the CHSA has begun to engage around reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Members are participating in a working group to develop recommendations for advancing these programs through the law and continue to work closely with our congressional champions to help them integrate these programs into their priorities for reauthorization. The Higher Education Act could be a powerful vehicle for scaling these programs particularly as we look to modernize the federal financial aid system to increase student access and affordability of higher education.

This activity is just the start of what we believe will be a long, and successful track record of work to help practitioners and policymakers break through traditional systems so high school students have greater access to high-quality postsecondary options. The powerful results of these programs speak for themselves. As policymakers debate solutions for tackling the nation’s college access and affordability problems, early college and dual and concurrent enrollment are a simple and obvious solution.

Dual enrollment in 2026: how many students take part, what outcomes look like, and where the 2017 policy items stand

Lillian Pace wrote in 2017 about the College in High School Alliance and the federal policies that could help early college high schools and dual enrollment reach more students. Dual enrollment lets high school students take college courses and earn college credit before they graduate. Several years of data now show how many students take part, who is missing, and what happens to participants after high school. This section sets out what that research shows, including its limits, and then returns to the policy items in Pace’s article.

How many students take part

The Community College Research Center at Columbia University, in an analysis published in August 2024, used the first dual enrollment count that colleges reported to the federal IPEDS data system. It found nearly 2.5 million high school students took at least one dual enrollment course in 2022-23, compared with an earlier estimate of 1.5 million in fall 2021. Community colleges enrolled 1.78 million of them, or 21 percent of their total enrollment. In Idaho and Indiana, high school students were the majority of community college enrollment, and in eight other states they were a third or more.

The researchers describe the data as provisional and note that dual enrollment is defined differently across states and localities, so the totals should be read as an estimate. The same analysis found that Black students were 8 percent of dual enrollment students against 13 percent of undergraduates overall, and Hispanic and Latino students were 20 percent against 22 percent. The report says gaps in access for low-income students persist, without giving a figure. Pace’s article stressed students from low- and moderate-income backgrounds, and these numbers show that access is still uneven.

What happens to participants

The CCRC report The Postsecondary Outcomes of High School Dual Enrollment Students (Velasco, Fink, Bedoya-Guevara and Jenkins, October 2024, revised in August 2025 to correct an error in the source data) followed students who first took a college course in fall 2015, most of them in 11th and 12th grade. Eighty-one percent enrolled at a postsecondary institution within a year after high school, 51 percent at a four-year institution and 30 percent at a community college. Forty-two percent completed a college award within four years of finishing high school, and 29 percent completed a bachelor’s degree. Among dual enrollment students who entered college right after high school, 36 percent had completed a bachelor’s degree and 12 percent an associate degree four years later, compared with 34 percent and 9 percent of recent graduates who started college without dual enrollment. In 41 states, dual enrollment students who continued in college completed an award at a higher rate than students aged 18 to 20 without dual enrollment.

These are descriptive comparisons. Students who choose dual enrollment may differ from those who do not in ways the figures do not capture, so the results do not prove that the courses caused the better outcomes. The report also finds that low-income, Black and Hispanic students are underrepresented in dual enrollment and have lower average completion than dual enrollees overall, although their completion is still higher than that of non-dual-enrollees in the same groups. That is a reason for a district to look at who enrolls and who finishes.

The federal items in the 2017 article

Pace describes four policy levers: state plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act, an Education Department experiment letting high school students use Pell Grants for dual enrollment courses, reauthorization of the Perkins career and technical education law, and reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. These reflect the status in 2017. The Pell experiment began in 2016, when the Department of Education announced 44 institutions for roughly 10,000 high school students and about $20 million in Pell Grants. Pace’s article gives the number as 43 participating programs, which may reflect a later count. The research for this section located no published evaluation results for the dual enrollment experiment and did not verify the current status of the Perkins or Higher Education Act items, so readers should check them before relying on the 2017 description.

What families and school leaders can ask

Who pays for the course, the family, the district or the state, and does cost differ by college?
Will the credits count toward a degree at the colleges the student may attend, and has the high school confirmed this in writing?
Who teaches the course, and is it taught in the high school or on a college campus?
Which students enroll, and which do not? A district can compare its dual enrollment roster with its enrollment by race, income and language, as the national data do.
What support do students get if a college course is harder than expected?

Pace argued that these programs help students save time and money on a degree, and the national numbers suggest that many families are using them. The evidence on outcomes is encouraging, but it describes who took the courses as well as what they gained, and districts that want to widen participation have to look at access directly.