Enhancing Dual Enrollment to Workforce Pathways

By: Edna Martinez, California State University, San Bernardino, Palm Desert Campus, 2025 Excelencia Policy Fellow

Latinos are integral to a prosperous U.S. In addition to the fastest-growing GDP¹, Latinos represent the fastest-growing segment of the nation’s workforce.² By 2030, one in five U.S. workers will be Latino.³ Workforce pathways are essential to the U.S. economy because they help ensure workers have the credentials and skills employers require. Enhancing these pathways begins with robust educational opportunities, and a prominent strategy is dual enrollment.

Dual enrollment, a strategy through which high school students earn college credit, is an evidence-based practice shown to improve student outcomes, including high school graduation, college enrollment, and degree completion. Despite the many benefits of dual enrollment, such as cutting college costs and time-to-degree, Latino students continue to be underrepresented nationally in these programs.⁴ Barriers to dual enrollment for Latino and other historically underrepresented students include limited access to information, course availability, eligibility requirements, lack of transportation, and other related costs.⁵ While such barriers restrict access to dual enrollment, they stand in contrast to Latino youths’ high rates of labor force participation, often in low-wage temporary jobs to support themselves or their families.

Latino youth are more likely to be working in jobs that rarely connect to long-term academic or career goals than participating in dual enrollment. In summer 2023, Latino youth (ages 16–24) had a labor force participation rate of 58%⁶ but accounted for only 20% of high school dual enrollment participants during the 2022–23 academic year. Meanwhile, White students accounted for 52% of high school dual enrollment.⁷ This disconnect highlights a policy opportunity: Redesign dual enrollment to be more explicitly linked to college and career pathways that achieve workforce goals and promote economic mobility.

Dual enrollment has grown and evolved over the last decade. States such as California are providing funding to incentivize partnerships between local education agencies and community colleges that expand access to college courses for high school students, as well as recognizing schools for their exemplary dual enrollment programs that demonstrate equitable access and outcomes, strong collaborative partnerships, integration with college and district plans, pathways, and embedded student supports.⁸ Despite this progress, much work remains to ensure these opportunities are accessible and effective for students. Redesigning dual enrollment requires shared responsibility and investment across sectors, including K-12, higher education, and industry partners. Institutions of higher education and school districts must engage employers as partners in shaping dual enrollment programs that connect classroom learning with paid, career-relevant experiences.

Strengthening Dual Enrollment-to-Workforce Pathways

To realize this opportunity, institutions must redesign dual enrollment in ways that ensure students’ early work experiences meaningfully contribute to long-term success.

Strengthening dual enrollment-to-workforce pathways requires integrating industry-aligned certifications and embedding paid experiential learning that combines workplace experiences with supervision and mentoring. When structured intentionally, dual enrollment can align students’ jobs with their academic and career goals, ensuring that early work experiences build toward future opportunities rather than remaining disconnected from long-term outcomes.

Importantly, dual enrollment should not be limited to career education programs that risk tracking students into lower-paying jobs and careers. Instead, institutional partners must ensure that dual enrollment is intentionally connected to pathways leading to livable-wage careers, graduate and professional education, and long-term economic mobility.

Despite recent gains, Latinos remain significantly underrepresented in U.S. graduate education. Access to graduate and professional programs continues to disproportionately benefit White and higher-income students, even though advanced degrees carry well-documented economic and social returns.⁹ Emerging research shows that dual enrollment experiences can influence students’ decisions to continue their education beyond a four-year degree,¹⁰ which underscores the importance of intentionally embedding graduate and professional pathways into dual enrollment program design.

From Random Acts to Intentional Pathways

Traditionally, dual enrollment follows a limited pathway: early access and recruitment, participation, and transition to postsecondary education. Too often, these programs operate inconsistently or without structure, leading to “random acts of dual enrollment.”¹¹ Lacking intentionality, students enroll in random courses that do not align with their postsecondary plans, with little to no support.

A more comprehensive pathway expands beyond this limited model to include early access and recruitment, participation in dual enrollment, completion of an industry-aligned credential, workforce preparation and employment entry, transition to postsecondary education, employment advancement, and, ultimately, broader economic and social outcomes.

While this sequence may appear linear, in practice, realizing such a vision requires deep intersegmental collaboration across K–12, higher education, and industry partners. Although most dual enrollment currently occurs within the community college sector, it is important to recognize the capacity constraints community colleges face. At the same time, dual enrollment pathways should not be confined to community colleges alone, as students who begin their postsecondary education at four-year institutions are more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees. Ensuring successful navigation of such pathways requires student support services, including academic advising, counseling, and career services.

The following example illustrates how institutions are continuing to strive to build intentional dual enrollment-to-workforce pathways to address workforce needs and ensure students’ economic well-being.

Students Engaged in Educator Development and Service (SEEDS)

Students Engaged in Educator Development and Service (SEEDS) is a program designed to address teacher shortages through an intersegmental partnership involving Palm Springs Unified School District (PSUSD), College of the Desert, California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) Palm Desert Campus, and the Riverside County Office of Education.

The PSUSD SEEDS program enhances dual enrollment by incorporating attainment of industry-aligned teaching certification, paid internships, high-touch advising, and mentoring opportunities. SEEDS is funded by California’s Regional K-16 Education Collaboratives Grant Program. While enrolled, high school students complete foundational Child Development courses, earning credits and work-based learning experiences. After obtaining a Child Development Assistant Permit, students secure paid internships within the district’s on-site state preschool/Head Start.

Graduates leave high school with 12 college credits, a job, direct entry to College of the Desert, and a transfer pathway to CSUSB Palm Desert Campus in Early Childhood Education or Liberal Studies, which prepares students for Multiple-Subject Teaching Credential programs in California. This builds a pipeline to a four-year teaching degree and, ultimately, to stable careers in education.

Notably, SEEDS includes students in a continuation school, a population often overlooked in college access and career readiness efforts. Continuation education is “a high school diploma program designed to meet the needs of students who have not graduated from high school, are not exempt from compulsory school attendance, and are deemed at risk of not completing their education”.¹² By doing so, the program challenges assumptions about which students are “college material” and demonstrates that all students can succeed in dual enrollment when provided with the right support.

Beyond early childhood education, SEEDS also exposes students to higher-paying K-12 teaching careers and education/childcare administrator occupations, an area in which Latinos are underrepresented. In 2021, Latinos represented 10% of education/childcare administrators compared to 80% for Whites.¹³ A summer mentorship program led by CSUSB students helps participants envision themselves as future university students, further strengthening their aspirations.

To date, of the students served by SEEDS, ten students have earned 12 college units, one has been hired as a paraprofessional substitute, and three are working as paraprofessionals. Based on lessons learned from the first year of implementation, key adjustments were made to strengthen the pathway. In addition to one course a semester, courses will now take place during the school day, allowing PSUSD to serve up to 140 students for year two.

SEEDS exemplifies how intentional design can transform dual enrollment from isolated opportunities into structured, career-connected pathways that advance both individual mobility and the nation’s workforce goals. Although focused on education, this approach, which includes industry-aligned certification and paid work-based learning, can also be applied to other industries.

Policy Recommendations

All stakeholders have a role to play. Specifically, institutions of higher education can strengthen dual enrollment-to-workforce pathways by:

• Expanding access to information about dual enrollment opportunities to students and families. All information must be translated into Spanish and other common home languages; this includes any presentations. Information regarding dual enrollment should also be made available early on to allow families to plan accordingly, particularly if courses fall outside of the traditional school schedule.
• Aligning courses with students’ college and career goals to support the development of professional identity, improve career commitment, and reduce time-to-degree.
• Embedding paid, career-relevant work experiences by working closely with industry partners and helping them understand that not all students can afford to work without compensation. Such investments can help reduce employers’ training and onboarding costs.
• Integrating industry-recognized certifications to enable early career advancement. Courses should be intentionally selected to prepare students for relevant certification exams.
• Ensuring seamless transitions to postsecondary education by promoting collaboration among all higher education sectors.
• Providing continuous mentoring, advising, counseling, and career support along the education continuum.

Latinos are key to advancing the nation’s economy. Strengthening dual enrollment-to-workforce pathways is not only a matter of equity, but a strategic investment in the nation’s future. When Latino, and all, students have equitable access to high-quality, career-connected education, the entire U.S. economy benefits through increased productivity, innovation, and competitiveness. Realizing this vision requires sustained commitment and collaboration among policymakers, educational leaders, and industry partners to ensure that dual enrollment becomes a powerful engine for opportunity and economic mobility.

Sources:

1. Latino GDP. (2025). U.S. Latino GDP report.
2. UnidosUS. (2023). The Latino Workforce: Driving America’s Future.
3. Jurado, J. A., et al (2025). A quantitative assessment of the U.S. economy and the pivotal role of Latinos in our Nation demonstrating.
4. Perry, A. (2023, November). The next phase of dual enrollment policy: A vision for the field. College in High School Alliance.
5. Velasco, T. et al. (2024). The postsecondary outcomes of high school dual enrollment students: A national and state-by-state analysis.
6. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (August 16, 2023). Employment and unemployment among youth — summer 2023.
7. Fink, J. (2024, August 26). How many students are taking dual enrollment courses in high school? New National, State, and College-Level data.
8. California Department of Education. (n.d.). California Exemplary Dual Enrollment Award. https://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/sr/ed/
9. National Center for Education Statistics. (2024).
10. Battle, K. A. (2020). The Experiences of Dual Enrollment Students on Completion of Baccalaureate Degrees in North Carolina (Order №28004313). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global: The Humanities and Social Sciences Collection. (2405626466). http://libproxy.lib.csusb.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/experiences-dual-enrollment-students-on/docview/2405626466/se-2
11. Fink, J. et al. (2022). From “random acts” and “programs of privilege” to dual enrollment equity pathways
12. California Department of Education (n.d.). Continuation Education.
13. Santiago, D., et al. (2024). Finding your workforce: Latino Talent in Education. Washington, D. C.: Excelencia in Education.