The Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) will begin a new project to study dually enrolled students at 15 community colleges across the country over the course of two years. The Improving Large-Scale Student Engagement Survey for Younger Learners project will allow CCCSE to amplify the momentum of Guided Pathways by helping institutional practitioners better understand the experiences of dually enrolled students pursuing pathways to postsecondary credentials. The project will include two administrations of a survey instrument refined for dually enrolled students, data reflection opportunities for participating colleges, and guided action planning for improvement.
“We believe this is such an important project because community colleges have the complicated task of educating a diverse population of students with varying goals—and among this population are more than a million high school students participating in dual enrollment,” said Linda García, executive director of CCCSE.
Even though dual enrollment programs can help students fulfill high school graduation requirements and simultaneously make progress toward a postsecondary degree, not all students who participate in dual enrollment find long-term success at the postsecondary level. It is critical to understand the experiences of dually enrolled students before they graduate high school. In doing so, educational leaders will be able to identify the supports that are needed to successfully assist these students—especially Black, Latinx, and other marginalized student populations—and help them persist with their postsecondary education endeavors after earning a diploma.
CCCSE received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to make this project possible.
CCCSE is a service and research initiative in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy in the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin. By delivering “aha” moments about the student experience based on insights that matter, CCCSE assists institutions and policymakers in using information to promote improvements in student learning, persistence, and attainment.
