Abstract
Dual enrollment in high school is viewed by many as one mechanism for widening college admission and completion of low-income students. However, little evidence demonstrates that these students discretely benefit from dual enrollment and whether these programs narrow attainment gaps vis-à-vis students from middle-class or affluent family backgrounds. Using the National Longitudinal Study of 1988 (N= 8,800), I find significant benefits in boosting rates of college degree attainment for low-income students while holding weaker effects for peers from more affluent backgrounds. These results remain even with analyses from newer data of college freshman of 2004. I conduct sensitivity analyses and find that these results are robust to relatively large unobserved confounders. However, expanding dual enrollment programs would modestly reduce gaps in degree attainment.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
