In this blog post, we dive into practical insights from two influential California community college leaders on how research and planning are key to making "dual enrollment for all" a reality. Meet Bri Hays, Senior Dean of Institutional Effectiveness, Success, and Equity and dual enrollment dean liaison at Cuyamaca College; and Darla Cooper, Executive Director of The Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges (The RP Group) and DE4EC quantitative research lead. As long-time friends, colleagues, and advocates for data-driven decision-making, Bri and Darla are championing the role of research in driving equitable student outcomes.
We caught up with them to get their top strategies for using data and inquiry to scale dual enrollment programs with an equity-first approach, drawing on their decades of experience and collaboration in our system and recent lessons learned from Dual Enrollment for Equitable Completion (DE4EC).
What Do We Mean By “Equitable” Dual Enrollment?DE4EC specifically focused on ensuring Black, Latine, and first-gen students and those experiencing economic disadvantage have access to and success in dual enrollment offerings proportional to their numbers and success within participating high schools/colleges/districts.
DE4EC community college and K–12 partners implementing equitable dual enrollment articulated a shared belief that historically underrepresented students are the priority for their work. How can data and inquiry support dual enrollment partnerships in clarifying their vision and goals for equitable dual enrollment?
Bri Hays (BH): Connecting the dots from high-level planning and data to practice is critical to this work. Many colleges dabbled in dual enrollment before the 2016 implementation of AB 288 College and Career Access Pathways (CCAP) Act, which sought to expand these opportunities to a broader range of students. When AB 288 became law, more community colleges moved from organic approaches to structured programs.
With the launch of Vision 2030, colleges must broaden their dual enrollment efforts even further, but they need to expand with intention if they want to achieve more equitable outcomes. Centering our work on quantitative data is essential. Qualitative data from our students, parents, K–12 partners, and campus practitioners are just as important. These insights help us understand students’ experiences and take critical steps to improve their experiences from connection to completion.
I’ve served numerous roles at Cuyamaca: chief institutional effectiveness officer, chief student services officer, manager overseeing the Admissions and Records Office, and dean liaison to a local feeder high school. In all of these experiences, the importance of centering equity through thoughtful planning and use of data to guide our dual enrollment work has never been clearer or more needed. Dual enrollment can be a real game changer for equity work on our campuses if we apply these important principles.
Darla Cooper (DC): That’s right. A college fundamentally can’t get to equity in dual enrollment programming without first looking at the data on who participates and how they perform—both during dual enrollment coursework and after high school graduation.
If you have an existing dual enrollment program, examine your origins. What was the impetus? You need to be honest if the college was originally trying to grow enrollment through dual enrollment courses, instead of focusing on equity or the student experience. Your program’s origin story may explain your current student participation and outcomes. If you don’t have a dual enrollment effort yet, begin with a big-picture conversation about how a program can support equitable access and success–both during dual enrollment and after high school.
Whether you have a program or are launching a new one, defining “equitable” for your district service area is essential when setting the goals for your dual enrollment work. Equitable is the opposite of a one-size-fits-all approach. Get to know what each high school partner emphasizes—whether it's comprehensive, theme-based, a charter, or career-tech oriented. Who are their students? What are their outcomes? What do students do after high school graduation, (e.g., work, community college, California State University, University of California)?
Each high school may need something different from dual enrollment to get where they want to go (e.g., increasing college-going, offering more advanced coursework to students already on the path to higher education). And, of course, knowing what's important to parents in each school community is essential. This kind of inquiry can dictate the vision for your dual enrollment program, and all these questions can be answered with data and evidence—not supposition, not anecdotes.
BH: Yes, and from the college perspective, dual enrollment can create a through-line across multiple disparate institutional plans. Utilizing research can position dual enrollment as a strategic opportunity for equitable enrollment management and a way to close opportunity gaps in student outcomes. Your college’s Institutional Research, Planning, and Effectiveness (IRPE) professionals bring a unique skillset (maybe even superpower!) to dual enrollment work. Often these folks have a 30,000-foot perspective on the institution’s goals and priorities. They also have an eye for data, research literature, and systems thinking.
These perspectives are quite handy when you’re trying to set goals and build infrastructure for dual enrollment to integrate it with existing college initiatives and plans. Consider inviting your IRPE folx to the table to discuss your dual enrollment efforts or even to help facilitate the creation of your dual enrollment strategic plan. They can help pull all the pieces together, and you’ll be sure to have data to inform decisions throughout the process!
We also found that equity-minded dual enrollment partnerships developed opportunities to welcome all students to college and put them on a path toward meaningful educational and career goals. What role do data and inquiry play in centering equity in the design of dual enrollment experiences?
BH: When we center our program design efforts on the data, we can better lead with intention and information. Before AB 288, many dual enrollment programs across our system served students identified by high schools. Courses weren’t necessarily grouped in ways that led to early completion of degrees or certificates, and dual enrollment students were not necessarily those historically underrepresented in higher education. All this is to say, without intention, dual enrollment efforts can perpetuate, or even worsen, equity gaps in access and success rather than mitigate them.
For example, I’ve seen a college set up dual enrollment classes for high school partners whose students maxed out their math sequence. These students have resources and access and are already on the trajectory to attend a university. The college course merely offers higher-level math classes that are unavailable at the high school and aren’t necessarily marketed to underserved or underrepresented students.
In other cases, colleges and their high school partners apply the “cafeteria” model to dual enrollment course options, marketing seemingly random general education or nontransferable classes to prospective participants. Students may stack up college credits, but this model continues the pattern of chronically underserving historically marginalized students—particularly those who are the first in their families to attend college. With this approach, they’re left on their own to figure out how to make their units earned through dual enrollment count toward a degree or certificate.
If we intend to leverage dual enrollment to close opportunity gaps in college access and completion, we need intentional pathways tailored to student needs; courses sequenced to help students build upon each semester’s dual enrollment experience, and support services that speak to participants’ unique needs. For colleges to truly provide a holistic dual enrollment program, zeroing in on the data is critical. Colleges need to know whom they are serving, what needs students have and what challenges they face, and how they can make the dual enrollment experience meaningful and rewarding for high school students, particularly those historically underrepresented in higher education institutions.
DC: Absolutely, and the DE4EC quantitative analyses provide a useful roadmap for where to begin this investigation. In terms of high school data, we looked at a series of metrics for student cohorts in the period leading up to and during the DE4EC initiative. We disaggregated all these data to identify where historically underserved students are thriving and where they may need additional support to reap the benefits of participation—both in dual enrollment courses and beyond.
We specifically looked at the proportion of students involved in dual enrollment and the demographics of those who did and did not participate. For those who engaged in dual enrollment through a DE4EC partnership, we considered what classes they took, what their DE course success rates were, and how many college units they earned before high school graduation. We also looked at high school graduation rates and graduating GPA, again comparing those who did and did not participate in dual enrollment. Colleges and their K–12 partners can replicate these analyses to begin unpacking whether dual enrollment is making a difference in students’ high school success and giving them a head start on college.
It’s worth noting that looking at the high school GPA of participants BEFORE they engage with dual enrollment is particularly important to an equity-centered approach. You could be attracting students who are likely to have positive outcomes regardless of dual enrollment. This analysis helps you understand if you are making way for students with lower GPAs to come in and improve their outcomes through a dual enrollment experience. Many high schools have used GPA as a gatekeeper rather than a door opener to dual enrollment. As a result, they’ve excluded students who are historically underrepresented in higher ed.
Dual enrollment partners need to meet students where they are with the support they need to succeed. While we weren’t able to get students’ GPAs before they started in dual enrollment for the DE4EC initiative, colleges can work with their K–12 partners to access local data systems to perform these more nuanced analyses of students’ high school GPA among other outcomes and characteristics when setting goals and designing programs with equity in mind.
BH: IRPE folx can also play an invaluable role in the program design process and not just sourcing and analyzing data. By nature, dual enrollment is a cross-functional effort that requires implementation and coordination with both instruction and student services. IRPE professionals can help bridge the gap between functions and facilitate sometimes difficult conversations about who does what and how or why—largely because research folx are merely working to document reality. They can interview team members and gather input from both internal and external stakeholders. They can also shed light on pinch points in systems and processes, like securing parent/guardian and school approval forms, helping students navigate CCCApply, or providing the appropriate professional development for dual enrollment faculty. The environment surrounding dual enrollment changes rapidly, and continuously gathering feedback and reviewing systems is critical to having a responsive, equity-focused program.
RDP Consulting’s DE4EC research quantified what participation in equity-minded dual enrollment can do to support students’ college success and retention. What metrics can help you understand dual enrollment program impact and identify further opportunities for increasing equitable postsecondary access and completion?
DC: Consider looking at what proportion of dual enrollment participants matriculated to postsecondary education after high school and where they enrolled. For those who matriculated to a California community college, how many came to your institution, and who are those students? These findings may have implications for future dual enrollment outreach.
Then, focus on the students who did come to your college to explore how well dual enrollment prepared them compared to their peers who did not participate. For DE4EC, we looked at both first-year-in-college metrics and longer-term outcomes. For first-year metrics, we assessed full-time enrollment, course success, fall-to-spring retention, and transfer-level English and math completion. For longer-term outcomes, we looked at fall-to-fall retention, overall units attempted and completed, course success rates, achievement of transfer requirements, and time to earn an associate’s degree.
But local college data allows you to look at so many more things! College researchers can dig deeper into some of the questions we can’t answer when using state-level data. For example, drill down to look at student cohorts from the same high school and graduating class. Go beyond the typical disaggregation by race, gender, first-generation, and economic disadvantage status to observe other factors that aren’t available in the statewide data. You can look at which courses are taken or services used and by which students. Depending on the dual enrollment program, you can monitor outcomes such as how many students completed their A–G requirements or transfer-level English and math before matriculating or how many students made it to 30 units within a specific timeframe. You can analyze what degrees formerly dual enrolled students earn and majors they pursue and then backward map the dual enrollment opportunities you offer from those outcomes.
Like Bri said, the qualitative piece is so important too, and we don’t do enough. For example, our DE4EC research found that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, students with dual enrollment experience were more likely to stay in college compared to their peers without, and this finding was particularly true for Black and Latine participants. You could take this data point and dig into what’s leading to these differences through student focus groups or interviews with high school and college instructors, counselors, and dual enrollment program coordinators. I would love to see more qualitative research factored into training teachers and counselors involved in dual enrollment implementation and helping parents support their children taking college courses while in high school.
The California Community Colleges’ Vision 2030 identifies dual enrollment as a key strategy for equitable access, support, and success and sets a goal for all high school students to graduate with at least 12 college credits. What advice can you offer dual enrollment leaders and practitioners interested in realizing these bold intentions?
DC: Simply stated, enrollment cannot be your motivator. Dual enrollment is not an end goal or a way to generate revenue. It must be about serving your students and community. And that's where the data come in. You need to know both quantitatively and qualitatively if you’re meeting their needs. Put students at the center—proactively and intentionally instead of reactively and arbitrarily. Focus on the positive impact dual enrollment can have on your students.
BH: Absolutely. It's important to remind people why we do dual enrollment. It can feel like they're just being asked to do more, and the politics of dual enrollment can be challenging. Even when the going gets tough, and we have a lot on our plates, it’s essential to remember how dual enrollment supports our equity goals. The reward of dual enrollment for our students and communities is profound. Showing the evidence on how dual enrollment helps more students—especially students who did not previously see themselves as “college material”—access college and complete their goals can really help us stay focused on our true north, equitable student success.
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