How can community colleges better support students to access and succeed in pathways-aligned dual credit? Since 2024, the Increasing Dual Enrollment Access and Success (IDEAS) project has sought to answer this question. IDEAS is a national community of practice facilitated by Jobs For the Future, which we participate in alongside our partners from the College of Lake County, as well as state teams from Texas and Arizona.
What is IDEAS?
Sponsored by an Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant from the US Department of Education, IDEAS advances an innovative community college “hub” model to improve educational outcomes for high-need high school students by measurably increasing student access to and success in high-quality dual enrollment courses (in Illinois, these will be dual credit courses). The hub is designed to centralize core dual enrollment operations and services through the community college, which will manage key issues such as course development to deliver robust student-facing navigation and advising at scale. Over the course of the five-year project, we are working alongside the College of Lake County to design and implement key components that strengthen partnerships with local high schools, address staffing needs, align coursework with locally meaningful pathways, enhance advising and student support, and explore funding implications.
In addition to gathering with the other state teams to learn from one another, we also have the chance to truly test the efficacy of both the implementation strategy and the hub model itself. American Institutes for Research is conducting a robust evaluation of both programmatic implementation and outcomes, which will produce valuable evidence to uplift student impact and inform continuous improvement of the local hub implementation. This evaluation will include data from “treatment” schools (which will directly participate in the hub model) as well as data from control schools in the region that are not included in the hub.
Why Focus on the Role of Community Colleges?
Dual credit is an evidence-based college and career readiness strategy that stakeholders from secondary, postsecondary, and beyond often support. However, state and local policy have often focused more on high school-based levers for scaling these impactful courses. As we have written about previously (2021, 2022, and 2023), Illinois state policy pushes high schools to scale dual credit opportunities (such as through the Dual Credit Quality Act and automatic acceleration policies) and particularly career-focused dual credit in College and Career Pathway Endorsements under the Postsecondary and Workforce Readiness (PWR) Act, accountability and quality measures for Career and Technical Education (CTE), and school quality frameworks overall. Although the Dual Credit Quality Act outlines the roles and responsibilities of colleges in supporting dual credit, it is limited in its ability to incentivize them to participate.
While colleges play a critical role in establishing and delivering high-quality dual credit courses, there are often limited policy expectations or incentives that drive them to do so. This imbalance in expectations can contribute to challenges or tensions in local partnership development. IDEAS is providing space to learn how policy and practice interventions focused on the postsecondary side of the equation can drive equitable access to strategic dual credit, particularly for high-need students.
What Are We Learning?
Even in these early stages of implementation, we are learning a great deal about how college-focused work helps identify key opportunities to enhance student access and support, while also revealing and addressing partnership-related challenges. In October, we gathered with the IDEAS community of practice to share updates on work across the three states, learn about shared advising models, and grapple with the challenges each state team has encountered in the early stages of the project.
Communication Is Key
Across all sites, teams are grappling with how to communicate about this opportunity with a range of stakeholders, including clarifying different value propositions based on what those stakeholders might need or value. For implementation, this means fostering deep relationships within the participating colleges and treatment high schools to build buy-in for participation. While the hub model establishes a clear structure for partnerships, these relationships will help drive the cultural shifts needed within and across institutions to ensure that these structural changes result in meaningful improvements in student access and success.
Harness Existing Policy to Drive Implementation
While IDEAS provides support and funding for five years, sustainability planning is key to ensuring this model can continue to impact students into the future. Across sites, teams are looking to leverage existing policy levers to support implementation of the grant in ways that will live beyond the grant period.
In Illinois, we are leaning on the Dual Credit Quality Act and the PWR Act in particular for building buy-in and alignment. Regional pathways mapping is driving alignment to College and Career Pathway Endorsements under the PWR Act. As the team works with treatment high schools, we are looking to leverage existing localized Postsecondary and Career Expectations (PaCE) frameworks to identify key opportunities to enhance advising for high-need students to access and succeed in strategic dual credit opportunities. In this way, the College of Lake County and its partner high schools can build upon what they have, rather than establishing entirely new strategies and systems.
Our Texas colleagues are leveraging HB8, their outcomes-based community college funding formula, to build buy-in from community colleges in IDEAS. One of the targeted outcomes is the number of high school students completing at least 15 college credits aligned with credentials of value, which were further defined in a 2025 statutory update. What this policy lever can help accomplish in Texas is incentivizing community colleges to scale their offerings, but not as “random acts” of dual credit, but rather in alignment with in-demand programs of study and credentials. Thus, the Texas team is framing their work as helping colleges meet HB8 requirements to increase their own funding.
Advancing Our Policy Agenda
Our work in IDEAS helps us test strategies in two key pillars of our policy agenda: Leadership & Governance and Student Experience & Conditions.
The hub model clearly articulates the roles and responsibilities of the College of Lake County and its partner high schools through a shared Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Much like the Model Partnership Agreement under the Dual Credit Quality Act, the MOU will provide clarity and consistency for treatment schools while enabling the college to scale partnerships more efficiently. The hub model allows for testing of how these processes may be streamlined in a way that centers student success and reduces administrative burden on colleges and high schools. The project will also test how investment in the intermediary functions of bridging secondary and postsecondary can lead to increased coordination across partners and, ultimately, access for students to high-quality experiences. All of this work is designed to enhance student experiences by scaling relevant and robust resources and advising to students to connect them with these strategic dual credit offerings that can accelerate their progress into and through a high-quality degree or credential.
What’s Next?
As our partners continue to implement this hub strategy, we are looking to answer several questions:
- Are more high-need students enrolling and succeeding in dual credit?
- What aspects of the hub are most effective for improving student access and outcomes?
- How can we scale this type of deep collaboration across secondary and postsecondary partners?
- How can we incentivize (or make it easier for) other colleges to implement a similar hub model in their communities?
As we continue to test the hub, we aim to learn more about what is working for our college and high school partners in fostering positive partnerships and what students need to access and succeed in dual credit courses aligned with their pathways. Beyond that, we are also paying close attention to what kinds of support and incentives might motivate colleges to commit deeply to both scaling dual credit and playing a larger role in how students learn about and navigate these opportunities. Ultimately, we hope to learn not only what works for College of Lake County’s community, but also what other colleges statewide can adopt and adapt to improve the dual credit landscape across Illinois.
