Bridging College and Careers: Using Dual Enrollment to Enhance Career and Technical Education Pathways

The Concurrent Courses Initiative (CCI), funded by The James Irvine Foundation from 2008 until 2011, comprised eight secondary/postsecondary partnerships across California that offered dual enrollment programs with supplemental student supports. The goal of the CCI was to expand access to supportive, career-focused dual enrollment for students often underserved by such programs and underrepresented in higher education, with the expectation that participating students would prosper in college subsequently. We use longitudinal administrative data on individual students who participated in 2008–09 and 2009–10, compared with data on other students from their districts, to test for evidence of differences in outcomes. Relative to comparison students, CCI dual enrollees had similar GPAs but higher graduation rates in high school. CCI dual enrollees entered college at similar rates to the comparison group, but entered four-year institutions and persisted at higher rates. Notably, CCI dual enrollees accumulated more college credits than the comparison group, and this difference in credit accumulation grew over time. After two years in college, CCI dual enrollees had accumulated 20 percent more credits than their district peers. These are the results of the data pooled across the sites; we also report results for the individual sites, which vary