Where Credit Is Due: High School Student Success at Community Colleges

Introduction

The Richmond Fed success rate is designed to capture a more comprehensive set of degree-seeking community college students, and it is a broader representation of how these students succeed. Earlier this year, we wrote about the results of the 2025 Survey of Community College Outcomes (SCCO) and found that by expanding both our definition of success and the students being considered in the cohort, we were able to include over 100,000 more student successes than a comparable graduation rate would measure. While the Richmond Fed success rate is a more inclusive measure of success than the traditional graduation rate, the measure is still a limited picture of community college student outcomes. Beyond the success rate data, the SCCO captures credits earned by non-degree-seeking students, workforce programs completed by non-credit students, and credits earned by high school students taking college courses.

Data are particularly limited for degree-seeking high school students who are not included in the traditional graduation rate or in the Richmond Fed success rate. The omission of degree-seeking high school students might miss an important contribution of community colleges to workforce development. In 2025, the Richmond Fed worked with community college systems in North Carolina and South Carolina to collect a unique set of data that allows us to ask the following questions: What do success pathways look like for students who enter community college degree programs as high school students? What would a community college's success rate look like if high school students were counted? Our findings suggest that, on aggregate, high school student cohorts have higher Richmond Fed success rates than student cohorts who enter after graduating high school.

Why Are High School Students Not Included?

It has become increasingly popular for students to earn college credits while in high school. In many cases, this will accelerate the time it takes to earn a degree and reduce the overall cost of college. These students are often called "dually enrolled" or "concurrently enrolled" students, and they take a handful of college courses that can be applied toward a degree or certificate after high school. States vary in how they administer dual enrollment education to classify, track, and fund dual enrollment students, which makes consistent data collection a challenge. In the 2022-2023 academic year, the U.S. Department of Education began collecting data (limited to credit headcount enrollment) on high school students enrolled in college courses through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). In the 2025 SCCO, which captures headcount enrollment data for the 2023-2024 academic year, roughly 21 percent of all credit students enrolled at Fifth District community colleges were dually enrolled high school students.

Due to data limitations, the SCCO excludes high school students from the Richmond Fed success rate cohort even if they are enrolled as first-time degree-seeking students at a community college. In some states, defining students as "first-time at this institution as a degree-seeking student" — a key criterion for we use to define the Richmond Fed success rate cohort — is reserved for students who have a high school degree or equivalent. This is largely driven by the federal reporting requirements that schools and systems face. Students are not included in the traditional IPEDS graduation rate cohort, for example, until after they have graduated from high school. As a result, there are students who pursue — and earn — community college degrees and certificates while in high school that never show up in the college's graduation rate. Some states track high school students in a way that would eliminate the risk of double-counting students who attend the same community college both during and after high school as degree-seeking students, but this is not consistent across states.

To maintain consistency across states, we exclude high school students from the success rate cohort. However, there is significant interest in understanding the efficacy of dual enrollment education and the scale of students earning postsecondary credentials while still in high school. To better understand the high school degree-seeking student pathways, the Richmond Fed worked with two community college systems (and 2025 SCCO participants) to pilot data of high school student cohorts for community colleges. The North Carolina Community College System and the South Carolina Technical College System provided a set of cohort outcomes data for each institution that allows us to compare Richmond Fed success rates for a high school student cohort with our main cohort (referred to here as the non-high school student cohort).

High School Student Cohorts in North and South Carolina

All 58 North Carolina community colleges and eight of the 16 South Carolina technical colleges reported a cohort of high school students. Even without high school students, the Richmond Fed's 2025 SCCO success rate cohort included about 80,000 students in the Carolinas that were excluded from the IPEDS graduation rate cohort. When high school students from these states are added to their Richmond Fed success rate cohort, the number of students observed increases by more than 40,000 students.

If high school students were included in the success rate cohort, they would comprise 33.8 percent of North Carolina's cohort and 10 percent of South Carolina's cohort (across all 16 technical colleges). Among the eight South Carolina technical colleges with a high student school cohort, high schoolers represented 22 percent of the cohort.

The distribution of high school students in the degree-seeking cohort varies widely across institutions within each state. North Carolina's high school students range from 18.4 percent to 60.7 percent of the full cohort; in South Carolina, high school students represent between 7.4 percent to 40 percent of the cohort within schools.

Trends in High School Student Success

Overall, success rates for high school student cohorts outpace cohorts of non-high school students. Of the 66 institutions reporting high school student cohort data, 64 had success rates for their high school students that outpaced their non-high school counterparts. On aggregate, the Richmond Fed success rate for high school students is 71.5 in North Carolina and 72.4 percent in South Carolina.

The high school cohort success rate is roughly 20 percentage points higher than the aggregate state success rate presented in our initial findings. (See chart above.) Perhaps not surprisingly, high school students have notably higher transfer rates compared to non-high school students and lower rates of attaining more traditional awards like a certificate, diploma, or associate degree. Even though high school rates of associate degree completion are lower than their non-high school counterparts, at least 10 percent of students who begin at a community college while still in high school earn an associate degree from that college within four years in both North Carolina and South Carolina.

Dual enrollment models vary widely in setting, intensity, and structure in ways that can influence student outcomes. North Carolina's extensive network of early college high schools (ECHS), which we define as public high schools, are usually located on a community college campus. This way, every student is dually enrolled at the community college, which offers a view into how pathways differ across programs. Dual enrollment provides all students with a head start on a college degree, but some early college high school programs are structured to provide an accelerated pathway for high school students — especially first-generation and low-income students — to earn a workforce-ready college credential while they earn their high school degrees. Though the ECHS cohort and non-ECHS cohort have similar success rates overall, the ECHS cohort earns associate degrees at higher rates than traditional degree-seeking dual enrollment students.

Similar to the general Richmond Fed success rate measure, there are limitations to this measure of high school student success. At the time of this writing, neither state reports workforce credential data for their cohorts, so this is an area where we still have limited visibility for high school students.

Is the Success Rate the Best Way to Capture High School Student Success?

State policies and funding strategies are designed for high school students to increase credential attainment and ensure students graduate with an actionable plan that will ultimately set them up for success in the workforce. As a result, community colleges are serving high school students who are enrolled in defined pathways that lead to a credential in addition to high school students taking one or two courses. Capturing the success rate for these students is important to understanding how community colleges serve their students, but there are drawbacks to including high school students in the overall success rate.

High school students are likely different from more traditional postsecondary students in fundamental ways that make including dually-enrolled degree-seeking students in a cohort with more traditional high school graduates. Compared to some postsecondary students, dependent high school students who live with parents and are connected with the supports a K-12 system provides, may have access to more resources and more time to devote to academic success. In many cases, dual enrollment students are also high-achieving students who are seeking challenging courses that their high school cannot provide. As a result, one might expect high school students to have higher success rates than the average community college student.

Even for the fraction of dually enrolled high school students who are classified as degree-seeking, important returns to community college, dual enrollment education may not show up in the success rate. For example, high school cohort students may use their dual enrollment experience to explore career pathways before committing to a post-high school pathway. Additionally, four-year institutions outside of the student's home state may not award transfer credits for dual enrollment community college courses. Students still benefit from dual enrollment courses in terms of college preparation or scholarship eligibility, but these successes would not be captured in the success rate. Still, these students represent an important segment of community college enrollment that are not readily captured in traditional institutional measures of success. Capturing the Richmond Fed success rate for high school students offers a new look at how community colleges are preparing students for the workforce.

Views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond or the Federal Reserve System.