Kentucky has established a goal that 60% of its residents will attain a postsecondary degree or credential by 2030. One strategy to achieve this goal is to allow high school students to jump start their postsecondary journey through dual credit (DC) courses. In these courses, students simultaneously earn credit at the high school and postsecondary levels. In 2017, the Dual Credit Scholarship program was created to reduce the cost of up to two DC courses that meet general education requirements at partnering postsecondary institutions. (The 2023-24 state budget increased this allowance to a maximum of four courses per student, with some caveats.)

In the following analysis, the Kentucky Longitudinal Data System was leveraged to explore these broad questions:

• How many students and which demographic groups are served by the Dual Credit Scholarship (DCS) program?

• Do DCS recipients enroll in postsecondary education in the first year after graduation at greater rates than their peers and do these rates vary among demographic groupings?

How many students receive the DCS and what are their college-going rates?

Kentucky’s public high schools produced over 230,000 graduates between 2018 and 2022. Of these, 54.6% were “college-going,” that is, they enrolled at a postsecondary institution within one year of their high school graduation. 

Among these graduates were three mutually exclusive groups:

• those that received the Dual Credit Scholarship,
• those that took at least one dual credit course but never received DCS assistance, and
• those that took no dual credit courses.         

Trends in dual credit participation and college-going rates

Since its inception, participation in the DCS program has remained steady at approximately 34% of each class. This group of students continues to college at the highest rate (around 83% each year), and they made up 51.6% of all college-going high school graduates between 2018-2022. Over 45 percentage points separate the college-going rate of DCS recipients and those that took no dual credit courses during this time frame. While selection bias may contribute to the high college-going rate of DCS participants (students already interested in college may be more likely to avail themselves of the early college-level courses the DCS supports), the Dual Credit Scholarship is primarily being utilized by students who choose to immediately continue their studies after graduation.

A closer look: DCS recipients by demographic groups

Dual Credit Scholarships are dispersed unevenly among demographic groups. In the following bar chart, participation rates are reported for three demographic groupings: gender, underrepresented minority (URM) status,¹ and free or reduced price lunch eligibility. 

• While there are roughly equal numbers of male and female students overall, female students utilize the DCS program at a substantially higher rate than males (41.3% vs. 26.9%), and account for 60% of all DCS recipients.
• The participation rate of underrepresented minorities is 13.4 percentage points below that of their non-URM peers.
• The discrepancy is largest for the free or reduced price lunch (FRL) demographic. Despite comprising 63.6% of all graduates, FRL students participate in the Dual Credit Scholarship program at half the rate (25.0% vs. 49.7%) of their non-FRL counterparts.

Participation rates by demographic group

A closer look: DCS recipients by GPA

A cumulative grade point average (GPA) of 2.5 is required to enroll in a dual credit course. Therefore, it is unsurprising that with higher GPAs come higher rates of participation in the DCS program. The GPA distribution² of DCS participants tends toward higher values, while the distribution of students who did not take a dual credit course is more evenly distributed. The top two GPA tiers combined (GPA > 3.5) hold 60.7% of all DCS recipients, but only 14.8% of graduates who never took a dual credit course. The median GPA of these two groups differ by almost a full point (3.67 vs. 2.70). These disparate GPA distributions suggest that analysis without consideration of high school GPA may be misleading.  (For clarity, the smaller group of students that took a dual credit course without utilizing the Dual Credit Scholarship are dropped from the remaining analyses.)

Participation rates by high school GPA

How do college-going rates vary by GPA?

College-going rates increase steadily with student GPA and the relationship is quite similar for both DCS recipients and those students who take no dual credit courses. When GPA is ignored, the overall gap in college-going rates between DCS recipients and the No Dual Credit group is over 45 percentage points (82.9% - 37.3%). However, when examined within each GPA tier, the college-going rate gap between the groups shrinks considerably, never rising above 27.2 percentage points.

This larger overall gap can be attributed to the aforementioned differences in the GPA distributions of each group. As depicted in the previous figure, DCS recipients are clustered heavily in the highest GPA tiers, while students with no dual credit experience are found in greater numbers closer to the center of the distribution. These distribution differences are also reflected in the number of college-going graduates, depicted by point size in the following plot.

College-going rates by high school GPA

How do college-going rates vary by GPA when demographic differences are considered?

Does the roughly 20-percentage-point college-going rate premium for DCS recipients persist for individual demographic groupings?³

• Female students in both groups (DCS and no dual credit) and at all GPA tiers have higher college-going rates than males. For all but the lowest GPA levels, males see a greater increase in college-going rate when comparing the DCS group with the baseline no dual credit group. In other words, the college-going rate gap between females and males is smaller among those who receive the Dual Credit Scholarship.
• The college-going rate for non-URM and URM graduates aggregated over all years and all GPA tiers is 55.8% and 50.4%, respectively. However, URM students maintain higher college-going rates at all GPA tiers except the top tier, where the gap is just over one percentage point.

• Differences between college-going rates of the FRL and non-FRL groups are large among the no dual credit group, reaching 27.4 percentage points at the highest GPA tier. The college-going rates of these groups are much closer for the DCS recipients at the top end of the grade spectrum, with only 5.4 percentage points separating the FRL and non-FRL groups.

College-going rates by GPA, split by demographic

Summary

Between 2018-2022, college-going rates among Kentucky’s Dual Credit Scholarship recipients were substantially higher than their peers. The data tell a more nuanced story when examined across a high school performance metric (GPA) and demographic groupings. 

Across the mid- to high-GPA tiers, in each demographic group that was examined, the college-going rate gap between demographic subgroups is smaller for DCS recipients than for students who took no dual credit courses. Notably, while the free or reduced price lunch demographic participates in the DCS program at half the rate of non-FRL students, the college-going rate gap shrinks substantially for DCS recipients compared to the no dual credit group.  At the 3.00 - 3.25 GPA level, the gap is halved and at the top GPA tier, the gap is reduced by a factor of five.

It may be worthwhile to investigate other measures of success, such as whether persistence to the second year of postsecondary study or credential completion rates are impacted by the DCS program. Finally, the influence of a related scholarship program, the Work Ready Dual Credit Scholarship, could be examined more fully, perhaps with a focus on employment outcomes rather than postsecondary enrollment.

¹ An individual is considered an underrepresented minority (URM) if the individual identifies as Hispanic or as a member of one or more of the following racial groups: American Indian, Black, Hawaiian, or Other Race. Multiracial persons are also considered URM, regardless of ethnicity. A person is not an underrepresented minority (non-URM) if the person is both non-Hispanic and one of the following racial groups: White, Asian, or Unknown Race.

² Students were grouped according to their sophomore cumulative GPA, in bin sizes of one-quarter of a GPA point (excepting the larger first bin containing relatively few students). The sophomore GPA is chosen because it may inform a student’s decision to apply for the DCS in the junior or senior year. Additionally, DCS-supported dual credit courses taken in the junior or senior year do not impact the sophomore GPA. Note that since the GPA of students who transfer into KY public schools after their sophomore year are not known, the subsequent analyses broken down by GPA exclude approximately 4.8% of the 2018-2022 graduates.

³ To avoid selective redaction of these smaller demographic populations, only GPA values above 1.75 are reported.