Dual Enrollment, First-Year Retention, and Graduation: Analyzing the Impact of Dual Enrollment on Student Success Outcomes at a Public Research University

Abstract

As more higher education institutions participate in offering college-level courses to high school students (often referred to as dual enrollment) it becomes increasingly important to evaluate the impact of participation in these courses on subsequent higher education student success outcomes, such as first-year retention and graduation rates. In recent years, there has been an increase in the body of literature devoted to this topic, however, much of this literature is aimed at analyzing the impact of dual enrollment courses on performance in community colleges. This study will examine the relationship between high school students taking dual enrollment courses and their later performance at a public, R1 university. Additionally, this study will employ Classification and Regression Trees (CART), a type of supervised statistical learning for identifying the success factors for dually enrolled students based on academic, demographic, and socioeconomic features. This study intends to offer results that provide generalizable knowledge for institutional decision-making pertaining to dual enrollment and success in higher education.