Research on dual enrollment that helps policymakers and practitioners build the support infrastructure students need to succeed
California’s dual enrollment expansion has opened college-level coursework to students who wouldn’t otherwise have access, but questions remain about what it takes for students to succeed. Using administrative data and a district case study from California, WestEd examined what students need to succeed in dual enrollment by analyzing where failure risk concentrates, what failure costs students, and what an effective support model looks like in practice.
The Challenge
Dual enrollment allows high school students to take college courses for credit. California’s dual enrollment expansion under the 2015 College and Career Access Pathways Act (AB 288, Holden, Chapter 618, Statutes of 2015). In return, expansion brought increased exposure to course , an outcome with potential consequences for college enrollment that the field had not . Districts and policymakers faced a fundamental question: how to extend access to dual enrollment for students who can benefit the most, while building the supports students need to succeed in it Specifically, California’s K-12 and community college partners needed to know:
- Who is failing dual enrollment courses, and does failure risk concentrate among the students the expansion was designed to serve?
- What does failure cost students in terms of college enrollment, and does that cost fall differently on low-income and first-generation students?
- Does attempting DE and failing still leave students better off than never having enrolled at all?
- What does effective support infrastructure look like in practice, and is it achievable at scale?
How We’re Taking Action
WestEd’s Center for Economic Mobility was funded by the Dual Enrollment Research Fund to conduct a mixed-methods study examining dual enrollment failure and its consequences across California’s public high school population, using student-level administrative data for approximately 1.74 million students across four cohorts (2015-16 through 2018-19) linked to National Student Clearinghouse college enrollment records.
The study produced three primary findings. First, the preparation paradox: the failure gap between socioeconomically disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged DE students widens as prior achievement increases rather than narrowing. Among students at the 90th percentile of math achievement, low-income students still fail at a rate 58% higher than similarly prepared peers — a pattern that cannot be explained by academic readiness, and that means raising eligibility thresholds will continue to exclude capable students while leaving the underlying barriers intact.
Second, while failing DE carries a substantial enrollment penalty of 10 to 12 percentage points, this penalty is not significantly larger for socioeconomically disadvantaged students (SED). SED students encounter that penalty more often not because failure costs them more, but because non-academic barriers — financial stress, navigational challenges, belonging uncertainty — make failure more likely in the first place. The inequity is concentrated in who fails, not in what happens afterward.
Third, for students for whom DE was the only available advanced coursework pathway, attempting DE and failing is still associated with a 6.4 percentage point higher probability of college enrollment than never enrolling at all. Open access produces a net benefit even in the presence of failure risk.
The qualitative strand examined Oakland Unified School District’s Point Person model — a dedicated K-12 staff member embedded in each DE classroom who monitors progress, coordinates interventions, and bridges communication between college instructors, school staff, and families. OUSD achieves an 82% average pass rate across 70+ sections per semester, demonstrating that high pass rates and open access are goals.