There is a growing trend for high schools to offer college level coursework through dual enrollment (DE), International Baccalaureate (IB), and Advanced Placement (AP) courses.  The AP program is the most widespread with 2.1 million students taking AP courses in 2012 (College Board, 2012).  Students benefit from taking these higher level classes because they offer more rigorous material and assignments than typical high school classes (Long, Conger, & Iatarola, 2012), and the courses signal college preparation to admission offices (Geiser & Santelices, 2004).  Students also benefit from the ability to earn college credit while enrolled in high school by passing national, standardized AP exams. 

Despite the growing prevalence of college-level courses in the high school curriculum, we know little about why students take advanced coursework in high school, how many college credits students earn from taking these courses, and how students use their earned credit once they enroll in postsecondary education.  For example, there are many ways students can use these advanced credits.  Students could attempt to graduate early saving time and money, or they might take a broader or deeper curriculum and use the credits earned in high school either to double major or to take more advanced coursework in a single field.  Alternatively, students can substitute leisure time or hours of paid work for the time they would have spent earning those credits in college.  Little empirical evidence exists to explain how students are using this popular pathway to accumulate college credit. This paper attempts to fill that gap in the literature by presenting empirical evidence using nationally representative longitudinal data on college students.

The main focus of this paper is on providing evidence on the tradeoffs students make in how they use their AP college credit.  It analyzes the relationship between earned AP credits and the quality (institutional selectivity, major, etc.) and quantity (credits, graduate degree, etc.) of higher education students achieve and attain.   It also examines their time use in college to assess whether students substitute hours of paid work for school work.  Empirical regression results using institution fixed effects to control for differential AP credit policies indicate students use their advanced credit to graduate early, double major, pursue STEM majors, and take more advanced math courses. 

This research informs policy in several ways.  First, it addresses whether the wide scale promotion of college level courses at the high school level is associated with positive postsecondary outcomes.  Second, it provides context for postsecondary institutions’ discussions of AP credit granting policies. Finally, it addresses whether college credits earned in high school is a viable approach to shortening time to degree in higher education.  At a state and national level, policymakers argue we must use our higher education system more efficiently by promoting faster time to degree, and we could potentially rely on advanced credit to encourage students to graduate more quickly (Alexander, 2009; NMSI, 2012). This study can illuminate whether proposals to foster faster attainment of bachelor’s degrees through AP credit are likely to be successful.