Unlocking Potential

Advancing Dual Enrollment in California

Dual enrollment, which has long been recognized as a powerful strategy to increase college enrollment, success, and affordability, is on the brink of widespread acceptance and implementation in California. So far, interest in dual enrollment has yielded a crop of well-established partnerships between colleges and local school districts across the state. Yet, compared to many other states, California has been slow to embrace this proven approach.

The time is ripe to expand high-quality dual enrollment as a strategic step on the pathway to college completion for California students—particularly those from groups that have historically been underrepresented in postsecondary education.

Through separate analyses of California’s dual enrollment landscape, CLP and JFF reached the same conclusion—that dual enrollment has enormous untapped potential to help increase college completion and advance the state’s economic prosperity. This brief outlines our research findings on favorable conditions as well as existing barriers to dual enrollment’s expansion.