Nationally, 15% of first-time community college students were dual enrollment (DE) students in the fall of 2010, and there is strong evidence that the number of DE students at community colleges has continued to increase since then, due in part to the rising costs of college. The growing number of high school students in college classrooms has generated heated discussions regarding the impacts of the current expansion of DE programs on college and students. On one hand, advocates of DE note several benefits of these programs for high school students (e.g. AIR, 2018; An, 2012; Speroni, 2011). Community college may also benefit from the expansion by gaining relatively stable enrollment in the midst of a steady decline of community college enrollment (Smith, 2017). On the other hand, college administrators have expressed concerns over the extra burden added to instructors to help DE students adjust to college (Reed, 2018; Jenkins, 2013). Since DE students are younger and new to the college environment, instructors may need to spend extra time to help them with both academic and logistic issues, such as book purchases, transportation, and getting mentally prepared for the collegiate environment (Conley, 2007; Hughes & Edwards, 2012), therefore leaving the remaining students with less support.
Using administrative data of all course enrollments between 2012 to from a large state community college system, we examine whether being exposed to a higher percentage of DE peers influences current community college enrollees’ performance. We focus on mathematics and English gateway courses that serve as key milestones in a college student’s pathway and employ a three-way fixed effects model that controls for student-level, gateway-course-level, and next-class fixed effects.
Our result indicate that exposure to a greater proportion of DE peers has a negative impact on community college students’ probability of passing the gateway course and their course grades. We also found a higher course repetition rate, though no significant impact on their probability of taking a different course in the corresponding subject or GPA in the next course conditional on enrollment. Further heterogeneity analyses indicate that the negative externalities from DE peers are most pronounced on community college students in the middle range of the ability distribution.
These results have important policy implications. The main impetus behind the surging demand of DE is the desire to increase postsecondary participation while reducing costs and time to degree for students (Boswell, 2001). Yet, the impacts of the expansion on degree-seeking community college enrollees haves not been understood. Our results suggest that this expansion might come with unintended costs. Additional course repetition induced by lower pass rates as a result of DE peers presents not only economic costs to students and institutions, but may also mental costs on students. Community college enrollees come disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds; if their educational opportunities are compromised as a result of sharing resources with DE students, then the DE expansion may further exacerbate the inequalities among different subpopulations in college success.
