Takeaways from (New) Dual Enrollment Data

IPEDS recently released a trove of data around dual enrollment. In this episode, we sit down with John Fink from the Community College Research Center to discuss what we learned from the data and how it can help dual enrollment practitioners. As discussed in the episode, CCRC built a phenomenal dashboard to dissect the data.
View the dashboard here – https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/john.fink/viz/IPEDS12-MonthDualEnrollment2022-23/Summary

Transcript

Matthew Sterenberg (00:01.224)

All right, John, welcome to the podcast.

John Fink (00:04.542)

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Matthew Sterenberg (00:06.548)

John, how does it feel to be famous in the dual enrollment world? I feel like it’s such a funny world to be in and like you’re your dual enrollment famous within the community.

John Fink (00:19.176)

You know, it’s honestly such a privilege to have my full time job be out there visiting colleges, visiting high schools, going to the conferences, just, you know, when the the iPads data came out that we’re going to talk about today, I just emailed eight different college practitioners that I just like had kind of, you know, been in contact with for for something or another in the last six months. And it is it’s such it’s so cool to just be like, All right, does this look right?

How’s it going? What happened with the shift towards alternative measures placement last summer? I really appreciate just being able to get to know what’s happening in different contexts across the country. So it really is a privilege and so fun to see the work that’s happening out there. So yeah, it’s a blast. It’s a favorite part of my job is going out into the world, outside of the college and visiting.

outside of the college I work at and visiting, especially high schools, going out there, it brings you back to when you were a student.

Matthew Sterenberg (01:26.978)

So, you know, the new iPads data dropped and your work with the Community College Research Center, like this is hugely impactful to your work and what you’re able to do. And I think the big thing that, one of the big takeaways is just the growth of dual enrollment. You know, when I was speaking with people just several months ago, we were saying 1 .5 million students and the data suggests 2 .5 million. So I think that’s a good place to spark.

to start just the growth of dual enrollment over the last several years.

John Fink (02:02.004)

So dual enrollment has definitely been growing for the last two decades, know, steady upward tick. you know, it also, it has been growing too since the pandemic from the clearinghouse, you can kind of get the year over year comparison and it’s something like, you know, 10 or 11 % growing each year since like 2021. So in the last three years. So we know it’s growing. That said,

The reason why the numbers are so different isn’t necessarily because of the growth, it’s much more because of how the data is being counted and primarily that it’s for a whole year of enrollment instead of just a fall semester or fall term of enrollment. And that’s generally true with community colleges that their academic year head counts are like 40 or 50 % larger than just their fall enrollments. And I think it makes sense for high school students, many of them are taking it in their…in their spring term of junior and senior year that you’d see a lot more added when you go out to that full year. So I think that is primarily why this is a larger number instead of the 1 .5, 1 .6. And there’s a couple other things to sort of pull out on that thread depending on like how much we want to go down this wormhole of counting.

Matthew Sterenberg (03:17.486)

Yeah, I know a few people have come out with, you know, 2 .5, like, let’s really dig into this number, but I want to start off kind of like high level. Like if you’re a dual enrollment practitioner, what do you think we should do with this data? How does this data actually improve dual enrollment or inform the decisions that we make? Like, what are you hoping people do with this data if they’re living and breathing dual enrollment every day?

John Fink (03:45.126)

Sure. Yeah, so this data is really about enrollments and access. It’s not about outcomes, this particular data, because it’s just about who’s there, who’s on the books at colleges. So I think that kind of gives us some sense of what do we do with this. We know the outcomes are also important. By the way, we’re working on right now a report with National Student Clearinghouse data to look at what happens to these students after high school. So we can talk about that. It’s going to be out in early October. But these new data from IPEDS, it’s really about the size of dual enrollment nationally and locally, the significance of this population, and then the representation by race and gender of who’s in dual enrollment compared to other students at the college. So think those are the three big things to focus on with this particular data source. First, dual enrollment’s big. We’re talking about millions of students. The significance is about what percent of undergraduates are in high school.

And that’s an important question and point for practitioners because oftentimes we see it lot of colleges, it’s 20, 30, 40 % of undergraduate headcount are being served through high school programs. And these programs are being delivered and administered by one or two people kind of in the back office trying to coordinate everything and make it all work. So we hear these phrases like, we’re an office of one or an army of one, small but mighty to describe and…

You know, that percent of headcount has really gone up pretty quick in the last five or 10 years, especially at community colleges, because older adult enrollments have really declined. And, you know, I would suspect that many colleges haven’t quite adjusted as quickly as the data has changed.

Matthew Sterenberg (05:31.476)

I’m, I really like your point about like thinking about outcomes. And then also this is a snapshot of, what’s actually happening because what I’m really curious about is, you know, we see the growth of dual enrollment, but looking at the outcomes data will tell us whether dual enrollment is an accelerator for those that were pursuing college anyways, or would have pursued.

or if it’s actually a door opener. And that’s part of the promise of dual enrollment, right? Is that, and you highlight this in some of your key takeaways from the IPEDS data, which is we still have black and Hispanics that are underrepresented in dual enrollment, but the growth of it is great, but is it just accelerating the people that were going to college anyways? It’s still great that they’re going to graduate on time, you know, potentially less, less costs and all that.

But is this actually gonna be a door opener for people and expand access for those that have historically not had access?

John Fink (06:38.046)

Yeah, right. I think what these new data show us is very consistent with what we’ve seen before from other data sources that these programs continue when you look on a national basis and in most states, they continue to sort of perpetuate existing inequities in the education system. And that includes what we see here that Black students and Hispanic or Latino students are underrepresented nationally compared to undergraduates. They’re underrepresented in dual enrollment.

But what’s interesting with this national data, which has institution level results where you can see every college across the country is sure, that’s the picture nationally that black and Latino students are underrepresented. But like for Latino students, for instance, there were 18 states where there was more equal representation of Latino students in dual enrollment. And at about a third of community colleges, there was more equal representation compared to their undergraduates.

For Black students, it was more challenging. Institutions and states haven’t had as much success closing gaps for Black students in access to dual enrollment. There’s only one state, was Massachusetts, where Black students made up about 10 % of dual enrollment students, 10 % of community college undergraduates, and they’re about 10 % of the K -12 enrollment. So just Massachusetts.

and only about 74 community colleges. So that’s about, that’s fewer than one in 10 colleges where black students were equally represented. So I think that’s interesting, but it also, as a researcher, it raises like, well, what’s going on at those 74 colleges? You know, is that by nature of something kind of about where the college is located or is that a particular policy or strategic practice or college or K -12 strategy? And that’s a lot of our research, we kind of, paint this national picture, and then we go to the places that are doing better and try to understand what is it that’s leading to these stronger outcomes. How have they closed the gaps?

Matthew Sterenberg (08:40.938)

Yeah, that’s great to actually like pursue the pockets of excellence and be like, Hey, what are you guys doing over there that we should think about at a national level or replicate? Like what’s actually going on? How do we learn from you instead of just telling you, we’ve got some great ideas in theory of what we should be doing. I think that’s a great idea.

John Fink (08:50.407)

Right.

John Fink (09:00.338)

And I should say we’ve that question and published a couple of different reports that are public and out there accessible for anyone. First one we did was called the Dual Enrollment Playbook with the Aspen Institute. And we visited six different partnerships in Ohio, Washington state, and Florida and described what they were doing. And then we built on that with our deep or dual enrollment equity pathways framework and research.

where we again went to places with stronger results for closing gaps for black and Latino and low income students, but also really strong college enrollment and success rates in that first year after high school. At colleges that were further along in implementing whole college guided pathways reforms to see, you know, what does that look like? How are they driving success, not just into dual enrollment, but through dual enrollment into college pathways. And we sort of outlined the set of practices and strategies that we observed from that field work.

Matthew Sterenberg (09:54.028)

So guided pathways being, the community colleges have, you know, it used to be kind of a buffet, right? And then the pathways came out and it’s basically, no, here are the sequence of courses you should take in order to transfer or to get your associates in this field. It’s just more prescriptive. And then what you’re saying is you basically have a dual enrollment playback. How can we get the DE students to kind of fit into the guided pathways work that’s already going on at community colleges.

John Fink (10:24.404)

Yeah, I think since a book in 2015 was released, Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, the Guided Pathways framework has really taken off as a reform framework in community colleges to help students right upon point of entry, explore and connect to programs and pathways that they’re really interested in and then be provided advising and supports and clear guidance and sequences of pathways along the way so that they complete in as quick as time as possible.

And from 2015 to 2020 and beyond, hundreds of colleges have been implementing these Guided Pathways reforms, but they weren’t always extended to high school programs or to dual enrollment programs, which were large in 2015, but just continued to grow in significance. And as we at CCRC studied Guided Pathways implementation, we did see there are some places that were very strategic about connecting those Guided Pathways reforms.

to their high school dual enrollment programs, oftentimes with a specific equity goal, you know, reaching out to the Title I high schools, to the schools that didn’t have a lot of dual enrollment offerings, didn’t have a lot of AP offerings, and thought about this, you know, Guided Pathways as a way to not just increase access to a dual enrollment course, but a dual enrollment course that’s going to really connect to students’ interests, get them excited about not just going to college, but going into a specific college program of study, a degree plan that they, you know, it’s gonna pull them into college, not just push them into college, but they’re gonna pull in because they see it’s worthwhile, it’s valuable, and it’s relevant to them and their interests.

Matthew Sterenberg (12:03.714)

So we’ve got 2 .5 million students, 1 .78 million are taking a dual enrollment course at a community college, and 20 % of community college students are dual enrollment. So I think the big question is, you mentioned earlier, like we’re an office of one, at what point are we going to add resources?

to this or why do you think it hasn’t been a bigger focus? Is it just because of the partnership aspect? Like, they’re coming in, you we work with the high schools, we don’t have to maybe recruit in the same way. Like, help me out here because it’s clearly growing. It’s an important aspect for community colleges specifically. Like, what needs to happen or what do you think needs to change at the leadership level for

John Fink (12:52.905)

Yeah.

Matthew Sterenberg (13:01.462)

for the resources to be committed to dual enrollment.

John Fink (13:05.396)

Yeah, I mean, it’s one in five community college students nationally. In 10 states, more than a third of community college students are in high school. And in two states, Idaho and Indiana, it’s more than half of community college students are high school dual enrollment students. So it’s quite large in some states. The question of how are we changing our organizational structure and our sort institutional resources to sort of respond?

Matthew Sterenberg (13:22.594)

That’s crazy.

John Fink (13:35.134)

to this changing and growing significance of dual enrollment is a question that we’re really interested in our next phase and our continued research on dual enrollment on my team at CCRC. I think that there’s different ways that institutions are responding to it. Oftentimes, it’s very kind of context dependent on how the programs are organized and structured themselves. The staffing needs can be different if the program is primarily based at the high school with a high school teacher.

qualified to teach the dual enrollment course, which I think in some of the higher sort of percentage of headcount states and places, that’s the case because, you know, first off, 80 % of dual enrollment nationally is the concurrent model where it’s at the high school. That it’s just, you know, if you add a dual enrollment section at the high school, you get 25 students versus, you know, if you’re doing it at the college, each one of those students, you need to add into the section. So I think that that really has fueled the growth, the concurrent model.

And the staffing needs and structures are probably different if it’s primarily based out of that concurrent model, where the supports are much more about coordination, oversight, collaboration with high school, as opposed to if students are really based at the college, then they’re sort of baked into the current college structures around faculty and advising and other services.

What I think might be emerging is sort of, you know, is staffing more specialized for dual enrollment, where there’s dual enrollment specific teams and people that are working on it, or is staff and or is staffing more integrated into college operations, like our advising team advises all students, whether you’re dual enrollment or not, or our instructional support teams, we support all instructors, whether they’re based at high school or not. And I honestly don’t know kind of where most places are at or kind of what are the pros and cons of those different approaches, but it’s something that we’re really interested in learning more about.

Matthew Sterenberg (15:40.16)

Yeah, the part of the, you know, goal of dual enrollment is to expose people to college. so, you know, if you’re in your high school classroom, like part of that is there’s not as you don’t feel like you’re in college as much. And so the more you can get the supports of a college, I think is beneficial, but at the same point, it’s like, well, if you get tons of supports. That’s also not what college is. So like it is interesting. Like how we have to support these students, especially if we’re going to reach people that aren’t having historically participated. But at the same point, like if we support too much, I know this sounds crazy. Like I’m advocating like leave them on their own. But like you, kind of get my point where it’s like, what is the balance of, know, you’re not, this is a college course and it should have the same rigor and, you know, college experience to some degree. So I think it’s a really interesting balance of you can’t have your hand held the entire time, but of course, this is your first entrance into taking a college course. You should actually get the supports necessary.

John Fink (16:51.998)

Yeah.

Well, and when you took when you when we visited places that have stronger outcomes for increasing access and strong course success rates. So they’re casting a wider net. But, you know, oftentimes, though, the concern is if we open it up too wide, then students are going to fail and it’s going to have the opposite effect of trying to increase college going, which is a really valid and important concern. But I think the response instead of, you know, well, then let’s just not open up access.

The response instead is, let’s lean into opening up access and also increase the supports so students are successful. And to your point, the way that folks have implemented that is in more of like a transition approach or a scaffolding approach. So really thinking about that first course or that first course or two that students are taking and really in those first three or six weeks, part of the training is about

and acclimating students to what it is, what’s it like to be a college student? What are the expectations of a college student? How is that different from a high school course? Oftentimes, the first course will be student success 101 focused on that particular thing, or colleges will implement the first courses to be those that traditionally have very high success rates. And that’s just a way to structure it and scaffold students so that they’re, you

as they’re eased in are more likely to be successful and then progress into more upper level courses. So it can be done. There are a series of tactics and strategies. It does require some additional investment in the instructors and their support, sometimes in supplemental instruction or tutoring. But what we’re finding is not only is that the right thing to do for colleges and communities, it’s also increasingly hard to afford not to do that because the business model

John Fink (18:44.7)

is really changing for community colleges with this growing percent of dual enrollment students. It can and should just be acceleration for the students who are university bound, but it should also be college access to increase college going among students who might not otherwise go to college. And with those additional supports and investments, they’re going to come back to your college instead of not going to any college after high school.

So we think we hear from colleges implementing this and their K -12 partners that really are strong incentives to invest in what we call a deep approach to dual enrollment.

Matthew Sterenberg (19:23.362)

The thought that just came to me was, you know, we’re looking at the data, 1 .78 million are taking it via community college. But a lot of these students are going on to four year. So the entity that really should care about it is not the entity that’s serving or, you know, supporting the dual enrollment at that time. It’s the four years that should really be helping

make the investments in a lot of ways, because that’s the pipeline of students for them. So I think, I wonder, you know, there’s obviously, I think some partnerships that are happening, but I wonder if that will continue to grow and the guided pathways stuff can help. But I, I wonder if that’s part of the reason why the investment isn’t always there. They’re like, you know, if you’re a community college, they’re taking a few courses here, but they’re probably going to end up going to a four year, just thinking about like,

why they don’t maybe resource it enough, that might be why, right? They’re only here for a couple of courses and then they’re going on. So if the four years really started investing in it through the community college, that could potentially change some things.

John Fink (20:36.468)

Well, I think what four -year institutions can do is really work to strengthen their transfer pathways generally with community colleges. And community colleges have been pushing on this for decades. But without the four -year support and collaboration and really leading that partnership, it’s hard to make a big difference on those transfer pathways because the four -year institutions are the ones that are offering those bachelor’s degrees. And so it’s very much a partnership. But what we’re finding is it needs to be university -led.

with strong community college support around the onboarding process. But when we look at community college transfer outcomes, first, a ton of students want to transfer, but only about a third do, and fewer than one in five ever get a bachelor’s degree in six years. But if you look at students with prior dual enrollment going into that pipeline, it’s about two and three times the outcomes for those students. So we’re seeing that more and more students are starting their community college transfer pathway in high school. They have much stronger outcomes when they do.

There’s many of them are still continuing at the community college after high school on their way to a bachelor’s and for universities that, know, for the students that are entering directly after high school with dual enrollment credits, my colleague really calls them stealth transfers because they’re kind of coming in as a transfer student. They’re also like a first time freshman according to the university, but they’ve got all these credits. And so I think that kind of opens up another sort of type of student to really think about how are they serving them through admissions and credit transfer.

And now it’s about one, I think it’s like one in five, one in four entering four year institution, like new students at four years have some prior dual enrollment and are this like sort of stealth transfer student. So I think that that’s a whole other segment to really think about, you know, what’s going on with those students? How are they being served? Where are the gaps? And that’s also going to be an increasing, you know, share of their incoming students as dual enrollment expands.

Matthew Sterenberg (22:32.34)

One of your other takeaways from the IPEDS data was five states make up a third, right? And it’s, know, Texas, New York, California, Florida, big states, big populations, and then Indiana, right? So what it made me think of is just how important policy is and the structure of your state, right? You have…

Ivy Tech Community College, basically one community college system in the whole state. And then you have policies at the state level. The governance matters. Like I just, it popped to me because I had known Indiana was doing really well for dual enrollment, but to be in that level of company, I think it speaks to, if you set it up the right way, you can have a massive program.

John Fink (23:26.13)

Yeah, I totally agree. And I’ve just had a couple, I’m not like super well versed on the Indian policy context, just had a couple of conversations. But from what I gather, you know, first off, there’s been big investment from the state and really this idea to sort of like get your first year, get your first year of college kind of done in high school, which I think like a broad sort of framing, especially around free college is important and strong because you need to get this message out there to folks who are not going to know about it otherwise.

What we see is that even in states where this is free, this is free college, there’s still a lot of communities and students that don’t know about it until it’s too late, or they could have benefited a lot more if they just heard about it in middle school instead of in 10th or 11th grade. So think part of this is a marketing of communications and making sure that communities that are not so attached to higher education, don’t have parents that went to college, that sort of thing, are getting that word. And then the other thing,

I think in Indiana, it’s pretty well funded in terms of like money going to the high schools and to the college to support dual enrollment or dual credit, which I think it has to be a win -win for the K -12 and the college partnership. Like, you know, there can be some like skin in the game or sort of some strategic investment. But what we find is that really needs to be shared. And if it’s not sort of financially or aligned to business models, it’s just going to be prevented from really scaling and prevent it.

dual enrollment from having the investments that need to be there for it to be an access strategy and not just an acceleration strategy.

Matthew Sterenberg (25:02.284)

So John, last question, anything that we didn’t cover, any other takeaways from the new iPads data or anything you want to say to people that are living and breathing dual enrollment every day, any other takeaways?

John Fink (25:16.542)

Well, I would say that folks should go, if you’re at a college or nearby a college, you should go and look up your college’s data. This is the first time we’ve had this public institution level data. I put it in a dashboard. Hopefully, it’s easy to access. You can look up a college, look up a state, see how many students there are, what’s the racial and gender breakdown, what’s the percent of undergraduates that are in dual enrollment.

But with any new addition of reporting, especially for something as complicated as dual enrollment, which is just defined in various ways across the country, there’s going to be issues around sort of data quality. And so in this first year, what I and many others really kind of really hope and encourage everyone to do is look at their data. And if there’s issues that look off, work with your iPads, key holder, or institutional researcher, or whoever it is that reports the data.

to resolve those issues and define it the way that it should be defined for your college so that in future years, ongoing reporting, this is gonna be every year we’re gonna be talking about the update, that it’s accurate and that this is the first baseline that we can sort of track both the growth in science and significance, but also are we closing gaps in working more towards equal representation of students by race and gender?

Matthew Sterenberg (26:36.034)

Thank you so much for joining me. Check out the CCRC, the Community College Research Center and the dashboard. I’ll put a link in the description of the episode so you can check it out, but appreciate you joining me.

John Fink (26:47.987)

Thank you.

There’s always more to learn.