Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This study uses a randomized, controlled trial (RCT) to estimate the causal impact of Tennessee’s new “dual-credit” policy, which expands opportunities for students to earn college credits for courses taken in high school. We focus on a new, dual-credit advanced algebra course. We estimate effects on high school and college outcomes including course-taking, enrollment, choice, and remediation. We find that the offer of a new, dual-credit mathematics course has no effect on the likelihood that a student enrolls in an AP math course during the same year. This result holds across the baseline achievement distribution and suggests the potential for AP and state-created, dual-credit initiatives to act as complementary policies, attracting different sets of students. Though we see no effect of participating in the dual-credit college algebra course on subsequent AP course-taking in mathematics for white students, we find a positive effect on the propensity to take an AP math course the next year for minority students, relative to their control counterparts. We are currently exploring the effects of participating in the dual-credit advanced algebra course on college enrollment, choice, and remediation. This is the first RCT of a dual-credit program and will provide evidence on the efficacy of an increasingly widespread policy that is intended to ease the transition from high school to college.