College Readiness Assessment
Category: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
Dual-enrollment (“DE”), in which students enroll in college-level courses and receive college credit in high school, has become one of the most prominent strategies for promoting college access and readiness. DE models range from a la carte options or "random acts of dual-enrollment" to highly structured pathways leading to associate degrees embedded in whole-school reform models. However, limited research has examined the breadth of DE models students engage in, identified students' latent DE profiles, or investigated how they relate to school structural reforms that prioritize DE. Drawing upon a sample of roughly 3.5 million students who graduated from a Texas high school between 2014-2023, 21.1% (n = 724,964) of whom completed at least one DE course, we estimate five latent profiles of DE students: 1) DE Dabblers; 2) DE Explorers; 3) DE-CTE Concentrators; 4) ECHS Non-Completers, and; 5) ECHS Completers. We then examine how these profiles relate to students' demographic and academic characteristics and school reform structures.
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/nbxh-9r36
