What Makes Dual Enrollment Actually Work: Sustainable, Aligned Funding & Data-Informed Evaluation

This blog is the fourth in series called Beyond the Course Catalog: What Makes Dual Enrollment Actually Work, a four-part blog series from Getting Smart in partnership with Britebound focused on what separates a strong dual enrollment model from the rest.

• Read the first post in the series.
• Read the second post in the series.
• Read the third post in the series.

We want to close this series where it started, with a young person standing in front of a course catalog trying to figure out what any of it actually means for their future. The first three posts in this series looked at design, access, transfer, partnership, and support. This final post looks at the two forces that quietly determine whether all of that is sustainable over time. Money, and the honesty of what a district chooses to measure.

Funding structures that keep students connected

Money shapes behavior, even when no one intends for it to. One of the more striking observations from our interviews was how directly funding structures can either keep a student anchored to their high school’s support system or quietly push them away from it. Some states, Massachusetts among them, have built dedicated public investment specifically for dual and early enrollment, including per-credit reimbursement to colleges and planning grants that fund the work of building a partnership before a single student enrolls. One Massachusetts-based organization has made the case publicly that this kind of funding is not incidental to closing equity gaps. It is the mechanism that makes closing them possible at scale, and the organization has pushed for substantial growth in state investment specifically to serve more low income students and students of color.

But funding can also work against a district without anyone intending it to. Open enrollment options that let a student take college courses independently, outside any high school relationship, can look appealing on the surface. They can move faster for an individual student. But they often mean that funding, and the support that comes with it, follows the student away from the high school ecosystem entirely. A college communicating directly with a seventeen year old, without any relationship to that student’s high school, loses the wraparound support a family may still need. Strong models pay close attention to this trade-off and work deliberately to make staying within a supported pathway at least as attractive as leaving it.

Measuring what actually matters

The final principle in our framework asks a district to be honest about what success even means. It is easy to measure participation, how many students signed up, how many seats were filled. It is harder, and far more meaningful, to track what happens after. Did students persist into a second year of college? Did they enroll immediately after graduation? Are they still on track years later?

One idea that came up repeatedly in our conversations was a healthy skepticism of long horizon metrics, like a former student’s wages at age thirty, as the only real measure of success. Too much distance separates a high school decision from an outcome that far out, and by the time the data comes in, it is too late to act on it. The strongest models instead look for more immediate, meaningful indicators, alongside tools like statewide college and career planning platforms that give counselors and families real visibility into course taking patterns and where students are ultimately headed.

That visibility is the last piece of the puzzle, and in some ways the simplest to test. Could a family, without a counselor’s help, find a clear and trustworthy map of the options available to their student. If the honest answer is no, that gap itself becomes the work.

Where to start

As you look at funding and evaluation in your own context, we would suggest beginning here.

• Trace where your dual enrollment funding actually originates, and whether it follows students in a way that strengthens or weakens your high school’s capacity to support them.
• Identify any open enrollment or independent college course options available to your students, and consider what, if anything, is being done to keep those students connected to high school support.
• Look past your participation numbers and identify what you currently track after a student graduates, if anything, and how far out that tracking extends.
• Test your own navigation resources. Hand a family member or colleague your current materials and see whether they can map a pathway on their own, without your help.

Why this all matters

We started this series by naming what strong dual enrollment models are not. They are not a single course, a credit count, or a funding formula. Over four posts, we hope we have shown what they actually are: a set of deliberate choices, made again and again, in favor of a young person who has not yet had a reason to see college as something built for them.

We are sharing this framework because we believe there are more districts and organizations doing this work well than most of us know about, quietly, without the spotlight. If this series brought a program to mind, one that demonstrates even a single principle particularly well, we would love to hear about it. Not every strong model needs to check every box. We are looking for the distinctive ones, the programs solving this problem in a way that could teach the rest of us something.

Because in the end, none of these eight principles exist for their own sake. They exist so that a student flipping through a course catalog finds something more than a list of abbreviations. They find a door, one that was actually built for them to walk through.