To help identify promising dual enrollment policies and programs, ACT used a rubric designed by the Education Commission of the States (ECS),12 one of ACT’s partners in this initiative. For nearly a decade, ECS has been advising state policymakers on how to design effective statewide dual enrollment programs, including use of this rubric, which is constructed around principles of effective policy.

The ECS rubric contains 13 model components grouped into four categories: access, course quality, finance, and credit transferability (see Table 1 on the next page). The policy recommendations in the next section of this brief address all but the last of these categories.13