Do dual enrollment students still benefit despite failing college courses?

Dual enrollment (DE) programs allow students to take college courses for credit—usually at no cost—while still in high school. Students must pass the course in order to earn credit. Efforts to increase DE access mean more high schoolers than ever are taking college courses. This has many upsides, but also increases the likelihood that unprepared students will enroll in them and fail. A recent report tries to uncover what happens to students who don’t pass. Could participating in DE still hold value for them?

A group of researchers from WestEd looked at data on more than 1.7 million California public high school students[1] who entered ninth grade between 2015–16 and 2018–19. The current DE framework in the state dates to 2016 and was meant to expand access to college-level coursework—particularly for low-income students, students of color, and first-generation college-goers—by reducing previously identified barriers to DE participation. Features include removing a number of academic prerequisites, focusing on community college coursework, and bringing instruction directly to high schools rather than requiring teenagers to travel to campuses. The majority of the full sample (55 percent) was Hispanic, and 73 percent were from low-income families, reflecting California’s overall student demographics. The researchers broke sample students into one of three groups: those who never enrolled (Never DE), those who enrolled and never failed a course (Passed DE), and those who took and failed at least one course (Ever Failed DE).

Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of California high schoolers (1.6 million, or 94 percent) never took a single DE course in that time.[2] Of the remainder, just over 93,000 took and passed their DE courses, while approximately 18,700 (17.1 percent) failed at least one such course. Students in the Passed DE group were demographically similar to the full sample, but students in the Ever Failed DE group were disproportionately Hispanic (65 percent) and from low-income families (83 percent). Students in the Ever Failed DE group were also lower achieving on average than their peers (46th vs 61st percentile in math). While low-income status was a strong predictor of DE course failure, the researchers note that the better prepared a low-income student was before attempting DE—i.e., higher performance on the state’s eighth grade math assessment—the weaker the influence of family income.

Because DE enrollment is not random, the researchers used inverse probability weighting to approximate the impact of failing one or more DE courses on a student’s likelihood of enrolling in college after graduation. They found that students in the Ever Failed DE group are 10–12 percentage points less likely to enroll in college within 18 months of high school graduation compared to their peers in the Passed DE group. The more courses failed, the higher the college enrollment “penalty.” There was no difference in these outcomes between students in different socioeconomic groups. However, the average student in the Ever Failed group was still 6 percentage points more likely to enroll in college than the average student who never attempted DE at all.

All of this is consistent with similar findings around students who take and fail AP tests, with a spokesperson saying that “studying hard, preparing for the exam, following through — can change the way students see themselves and raise their ambitions for college.” The WestEd researchers (and other analysts) conclude from their findings that efforts to remove barriers to DE participation for lower-income students and students of color provide value for those students, regardless of whether they pass their college courses. This appears to be modestly true when college enrollment is the only outcome under scrutiny, but that should not be the end point of the discussion. The more academically prepared DE students are, the likelier they are to pass their courses and accrue credits that will be valuable in persistence and completion and, perhaps, in reducing college costs along the way. In other words, high schools should give more of their students access to DE, but they should also make sure that they are academically ready for the work before they start.

SOURCE: Jenna Howard Terrell, et al., “Course Failure in Dual Enrollment and the Impact on College-Going,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (July 2026).