This blog post is based on reports prepared for the TIAA Institute by George Spencer, Alex Monday, and Renni Turpin,[1] as well as an article in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.[2]

Dual enrollment programs, which allow high school students to take college-level courses, have rapidly expanded in the United States over the past two decades. These programs are praised for increasing access to higher education, reducing costs, and accelerating degree completion (found in prior research here, here, and here). By enabling students to earn college credits while still in high school, dual enrollment helps provide a head start, build academic momentum, and shorten the time to graduation.

However, the effectiveness of dual enrollment depends largely on whether the credits earned in high school are accepted by colleges. Credit transferability varies widely across institutions and can create a significant barrier for students, especially those starting at two-year colleges. Given that nearly 70 percent of dual enrollment programs operate at community colleges, many dual enrollment students will eventually attempt to transfer community college credits. According to the Government Accountability Office, community college students lose an average of 8.2 credits when transferring, slowing their academic progress and raising costs. This issue disproportionately impacts historically marginalized students, who are more likely to attend two-year colleges and face transfer barriers, as noted by previous Ithaka S+R research.

In Georgia, where dual enrollment participation is high, students attending two-year technical colleges in the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG) faced particular challenges with credit transfer. To address this, Georgia introduced the 2012 Complete College Georgia Articulation Agreement, which was designed to ensure that credits earned at TCSG institutions through dual enrollment are accepted at four-year universities in the University System of Georgia (USG), to help students build academic momentum and improve on-time graduation rates.

The implementation of this policy presented an opportunity to study the impact of improving and streamlining dual enrollment credit transfer on key student outcomes. Using data from Georgia’s Academic and Workforce Analysis and Research Data System (GA•AWARDS), we constructed a dataset of undergraduates who enrolled at an USG institution as first-time freshmen between 2008 and 2015 and took dual enrollment courses at either a TCSG or USG institution (more information on the data and methods used can be found in the TIAA and EEPA publications).

What did we learn?

The 2012 articulation agreement in Georgia had a clear, positive effect on on-time graduation rates for students participating in dual enrollment at a TCSG institution.

  • Based on descriptive analyses, the four-year graduation rates of students who participated in dual enrollment at a TCSG institution and later enrolled at a USG institution increased by over 10 percentage points between the 2011 and 2015 cohorts (i.e., before and after the creation of the articulation agreement).
  • Based on our analysis, the policy was responsible for a 5.5 percentage point increase in the four-year graduation rate and a 5.8 percentage point increase in the five-year graduation rate of these TCSG students.

Despite these overall positive trends, the benefits of the policy were not equally distributed among all student groups. The study found that historically marginalized groups, particularly Black and low-income students, did not experience the same gains in degree completion.

  • Higher-income students experienced a 7.4 percentage point increase in four-year graduation rates, while White students experienced a 6 percentage point increase. In contrast, Black and low-income students showed little to no improvement.
  • The key difference lay in the types of courses students took. Black and low-income students earned fewer credits in transferable courses than their White and higher-income peers. Only 22 percent of Black students earned credits in transferable courses, compared to 42 percent of White students. This disparity in course-taking likely explains why the policy didn’t have the same impact on these groups.

These findings highlight an important equity issue: while articulation agreements can help streamline degree pathways for many students, they don’t necessarily address the deeper structural inequalities that shape students’ access to meaningful coursework. Black and low-income students may face additional barriers in accessing transferable dual enrollment courses, which limits their ability to benefit from policies like the articulation agreement.

To ensure that all students benefit equally from dual enrollment and articulation agreements, more attention must be paid to access and awareness. In addition to the recommendations from this study, the holistic credit mobility framework developed by Ithaka S+R is another important resource that outlines key actions that schools and policymakers can take to equitably improve access and success:

  • Provide better guidance to students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds, to ensure they are taking transferable courses. Ithaka S+R has undertaken efforts to make transfer more transparent with up-to-date information made publicly available through its work on Transfer Explorer and the High School to CUNY portal. 
  • Increase support for high schools in offering dual enrollment courses that align with statewide articulation agreements through clear guidelines, funding, and partnerships between K-12 and higher education (ex., OnRamps at the University of Texas at Austin).
  • Address structural barriers that limit access to dual enrollment opportunities for historically marginalized groups. Since 2023, Ithaka S+R, the National Education Equity Lab, and Stanford University have collaborated through an American Talent Initiative community of practice to develop and offer high-quality courses for college credit at lower-income high schools in hybrid formats.
  • Promote inter-institutional collaboration to ensure alignment of learning outcomes and avoid repeated learning of the same content.

By establishing a statewide dual enrollment articulation agreement guaranteeing credit transferability, Georgia has taken a significant step towards creating more affordable and efficient pathways to a college degree. But the challenge remains to ensure that every student, especially those from historically marginalized groups, has the chance to take advantage of this opportunity.

Though not specific to dual enrollment credit transfer, you can find the landing page for Ithaka S+R’s research on credit mobility here. It offers valuable insights into the significance of credit mobility, discusses various tools currently being implemented and evaluated for their impact, and explores the role of guided pathways in facilitating credit transfer.

 

[1] George Spencer, Alex Monday, and RenniTurpin, “Can State Policies Reduce Racial Disparities in the Time-to-Degree? Examining the Interconnected Role of Statewide Articulation Agreements with Dual Enrollment,” TIAA Institute,Research Dialogue, no. 203, September 2023, https://www.tiaa.org/public/institute/publication/2023/can-state-policies-reduce-racial-disparities-in-the-time-to-degr

[2] George Spencer and Alex Monday, “Dual Enrollment and Conditional Credit Acceptance: Effects of Georgia’s Articulation Agreement on Timely Degree Completion”, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, December 9, 2024, https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737241296558.