<p>I keep hearing high school counselors and college admissions officers warn my son that college is "a lot harder than high school," "a big step up in workload," "going to push you to your limits," and so on. I quietly accept these statements because I imagine they have some motivational value for my son; that is, if he expects it to be harder, he will be prepared to work harder, which can only help him.</p>
<p>Here's the problem: I disagree. I immediately jumped from B's in high school to A's in college without consciously changing my study habits. Something about the increased independence and excitement of having centuries of knowledge at my fingertips made whatever increase in workload there was...and I'm not sure there was one...feel like nothing. And my son is enough like me that I'm pretty sure he will have a similar experience.</p>
<p>My first question is, should I just keep my mouth shut? :)</p>
<p>Second, does anyone here agree with me? Is all this talk about how very, very difficult college is just a scare tactic meant to keep the student's nose in the books? Or do I have a skewed perspective? I was the middling-grades/high-test-scores type. Does that account for my experience?</p>
<p>I thought college was much harder than h.s but I went from a small rural h.s in a poor county to a big state u. where it was sink or swim. DH had much the same experience
majoring in engineering. We both graduated in the top ten in our high school classes but I guess tha’s not saying much based on the caliber of our h.s.</p>
<p>Neither of my kids worked partuicularly hard in h.s. S1 sailed through making A’s. S2 sailed through making B’s and some C’s. S1 found college to be harder but still made good grades. S2 got a cold slap in the face first semester, ended up on academic probation and had to really get his act together in the second semester of freshman year.
It was a lot harder than he thought it would be. Both at big state u’s. We have no small college experience. </p>
<p>My guess is that it is an individual experience. What is easy for one can be a challenge for another. Doing well in college is not always totally a result of the classroom experience. I think kids have to figure it out for themselves.
We have found that ours are not real interested in hearing about our experiences “back in the day”,lol.</p>
<p>My only experience with this is my own, and it’s from a long time ago, but I did not find college to be any harder than high school. In fact, I found I had more time in college to accomplish everything I needed to do, so in many respects it was easier. My high school grades and my college grades were comparable (3.9). I think a lot depends on the high school one attends. I know the kids from my D’s high school usually come back from college saying they felt very well prepared and that college wasn’t as difficult as they’d feared, but they all knew other kids from different high schools for whom that was not the case.</p>
<p>College has many longer term assignments since classes only meet twice a week. They coddle you less and you have to have good time management skills</p>
<p>I have wondered this same thing and am convinced college will be MUCH EASIER than H.S. My kids go to a very rigorous HS which is about 45 minutes away so between school work and ECs they are getting home around 9 p.m to 3+ hours of homework/papers. Given the huge amount of extra time my S will have this fall in college and zero commute, I think it will be easy in comparision. Time will tell…</p>
<p>It depends on the college and the high school.</p>
<p>My daughter, who graduated from a selective-admissions IB program, thought college was definitely easier than high school. And she’s at a college with a reputation for making its students work hard.</p>
<p>Meadesport makes an important point: Grading in college is based on fewer assignments than in high school, and they’re spread farther apart. Each assignment or test is therefore worth more. It can be a significant adjustment to get used to every test being such a high-stakes event and to having to be responsible for a much larger chunk of material for every test.</p>
<p>Me, too. Sitting in class all day long, five days a week, sucked the life right out of me. In college I relished going to class for a few hours a week and learning on my own the rest of the time. So much better than being babysat.</p>
<p>As a former college professor, I have a different slant.
Although it does depend on both the college, high school and the major, in general, college is MUCH harder than high school. Why?</p>
<ol>
<li><p>College has a HUGE amount of distractions: You are living with a lot of kids. Not only do many of them want to party,but you also have a lot of hot babes/guys running around. :In addition, there are usually hundreds of clubs and organizations to join. These distractions would distract almost anyone that isn’t dead! You really need some good self control and time management to deal with these distractions.</p></li>
<li><p>College doesn’t spoonfeed you: High school does a LOT of spoonfeeding. Lets face it. You are attending for about 8 hours or more per day. In college, the average class is 3 hours per week. There is a LOT more individualized reading and studying required of the student.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>In addition, you need to have strong outlining and notetaking skills that many smart kids in high school didn’t develop. Haven’t you heard of the kid who did well in high school with very little work? This generally doesn’t occur in college. The top kids work HARD and smartly! IN fact, from my experience, I have found that intellectual horsepower only represents about 30-40% of the requirements for success. Drive, determination, time management are by far the most important factors for college success,which is why the SAT and even high school GPAs aren’t necessarily great predictors of college success. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>The work can be a LOT more sophisticated: For most years, especially past the freshmen year, college work is more sophisticated. Both the quality and quantity of papers increase in college as does the sophistication of all readings and assignments. Trust me on this: try taking some advanced engineering courses or quantum mechanics, or organic chemistry and tell me that high school is easier. Even advanced business courses such as intermediate accounting and statistics are much tougher than most high school courses</p></li>
<li><p>College demands strong time management skills: Lets face it, you get home from high school and many folks have parents telling them “do your homework.” Nothing like this happens in college. In addition, kids need some time for sociializing. Thus, good time management skills are required that aren’t as expected in high school. IN fact, if I had to name the top two reasons that kids don’t do well in college , I would name poor time management skills and the inability to handle the distractions well.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>The only thing that makes colleges perhaps a bit easier is that starting in the sophomore year, you can start taking courses that are more suitable to your strengths instead of taking a broad range of courses, some of which you don’t want and some of which you might not be that suited for.</p>
<p>It depends: on the rigor of the HS, the rigor/grading curve of the college, and the course of study.</p>
<p>I can tell you categorically that our son, studying engineering at “very selective” university, is working his butt off like he never has before. The attrition rate in the engineering school reflects the demands of the curriculum.</p>
<p>One thing to keep in mind: the bottom two thirds or three quarters of the curve from high school are not there in most colleges. And at highly selective colleges the bottom 90% is gone. The overall level of ability of your classmates is significantly higher in college. I think one of the hardest adjustments straight-A kids have to make when they go off to high-end colleges is that now pretty much the whole school is full of straight-A kids, and they may well be merely average or below average in that crowd.</p>
<p>If you want the same high grades in college that you got in high school, you are going to have to step it up a notch or two.</p>
<p>I graduated from college in 1982. I did poorly on my SAT’s but went to a top HS in NJ where I was a very average student and was a hard worker. </p>
<p>I started off at a state college in CT that, on paper, was an academic match. I ended up being an academic star there. It felt good to be so successful after being a very mediocre student at my competitive HS. I believe I did so well because I was studying what I loved and had great writing skills. I was challenged but was shocked at the lack of writing ability of many of the other students (I would read their work because I typed papers for $). I transferred to a state college in NJ that was a bit more difficult/competitive than the CT college. I graduated with honors.</p>
<p>It’s interesting to note that I studied abroad in Israel at a very competitive/top university for 1 semester and a summer. I was amongst students from around the world who were attending top universities in their home countries (including many from Ivies). I worked harder there than at the 2 state colleges that I had attended in the US. I had to work very hard, and I ended up with mostly B’s and C’s (some A’s). I was also studying mostly Hebrew, poli sci and history in Israel; foreign subjects for me since I was an Exercise Physiology major in the US.</p>
<p>taxguy has a good post. I remember S1 calling me a month or so into his freshman fall and proudly telling me he had just finished his “first” college paper for a Sociology class. I asked him what he wrote about and he reported that he had written about learning how to balance everything. I never said anything to him but my first reaction was “I wonder how many hundreds of papers that prof has read on that very same theme.” It is in my mind the number one predictor of potential success. Thems that learn balance will survive and thems that don’t won’t.</p>
<p>My daughter said she’s never studied so hard in her life. In high school, if she put in the effort, she could be sure it’ll be an A. In college, she could put everything into a test, and never be sure what she would get on it. At her school everything is graded on a curve, she is taking mostly upper level courses now, where there are people with natural aptitude for some of those subjects. </p>
<p>We’ve had a few sobbing, “I can’t do this” sessions. She is determined to keep up high GPAs no matter what. I have a lot of admiration for her work ethic. Yes, college is kicking her butt, but I would have been disappointed if it was too easy for her.</p>
<p>I thought college was much, much harder than high school.</p>
<p>If I had been at a different college, I might have thought differently. The people I knew who went from my high school to one of our in-state publics, for example, mostly thought that college was easier than high school.</p>
<p>I did just the opposite…I went from a large high school in a huge city, to a small LAC in New England.</p>
<p>But I, too, thought college was much, MUCH harder than h.s. Somebody said it above: The thousand plus students I was competing with in high school were not, in fact, bona fide competition. However, the top 10% were. And in college, I was faced with the top 10% from every great high school in the country, more or less.</p>
<p>I only have large university experience but didn’t find college to be much harder than high school…and I went to a HS that made few demands on us.</p>
<p>One thing that might be harder is the grading…you hear of certain courses being the “flunk out” courses…(I always hear about organic chemistry). In college, if you have to pass organic chemistry or calculus to get your degree, some people - perhaps many people still fail. And if you just can’t pass, you change your major or leave the school.</p>
<p>Can you imagine if high schools had similar classes? What if 10th grade chemistry was impossibly difficult for many good students and some otherwise good students had to take it 2 or 3 times to pass it and others didn’t pass at all? High school teachers simply aren’t allowed to fail a lot of “good students.”</p>
<p>Example from my Son’s HS experience - he took an AP class he really shouldn’t have; there was no “regular” counterpart to drop down to. But the teacher had a “rule” that if a student came to class and did his homework, the student wouldn’t fail, even if the test grades indicated “failing” performance. We were certainly appreciative of this, but I don’t believe this would ever happen in most colleges.</p>
<p>Right on! When I went to college, the students who found it “easy” weren’t necessarily the smartest students, they were the most organized, (I was not, at first). The same thing held true as I watched S1 and his friends tackle college. The innately smart one with limited organization skills struggled, the ones with their “system” found it much easier.</p>
<p>Of course, as the smart one got his own system and the material got tougher, he flourished.</p>
<p>Finally there is the question of the type of material and your personal interests. Science and Math offer a different intellectual challenge than say, discussions of the nuances of Plato’s Republic or the ramifications of situational ethics. How hard or easy you find college can/will be related to your general comfort level for the type of material you’re being challenged with.</p>
<p>I suppose it actually benefited me that I was not involved in extracurriculars my first semester at college. That left all the time in the world to study. Not that I studied a lot, but I could do it whenever I wanted, day or night, without having to fit anything else in. Once I realized that I could get good grades without knocking myself out, then I started adding others things to my schedule.</p>
<p>My two older sons found that college played to their strengths a lot more than high school. My boys were the sort who could gets Bs instead of As because they didn’t do all of the little homework assignments or make pretty posters like some of the girls did. They did much better with fewer but meatier assignments and bigger tests/exams instead if quizzes designed only to ensure you did the nightly homework.</p>
<p>On the other hand, one of my friend’s daughters found college a hard academic adjustment because she was more of a hard working dutiful grinder in high school–she got a boost to her grades by getting every homework point,etc… She did better digesting academic info in smaller bites and found the college work style very hard to get used to.</p>
<p>The jury is out for my youngest son who will be a freshman this fall.</p>
<p>Taxguy’s comments are spot on. Since the OP is talking about preparing her son for college, I’d say, yes, let him believe it’s going to be significantly harder than HS (it can only help him start college with the right mindset).</p>
<p>Here’s what I tell my kids:</p>
<p>1) You may be a great student in HS but you’re just one of a crowd of great students at colleges, so work hard.</p>
<p>2) Go to class! I was so happy that my DD’s college told her during orientation that the top predictor of success in college is going to class and she faithfully abides by that rule.</p>
<p>3) Do you work ahead of time and turn it in on time, that will help you get good grades. </p>
<p>4) Expect that for every hour of time you spend in a classroom setting, you will do four hours of reading/researching/homework/writing.</p>
<p>5) You are at college to get an education. Get your educational responsibilities taken care of before you go off to do recreational activities.</p>