<p>@bookworm - what a great attitude! There is knowledge gained from every educational class, and it will serve well in future years. Retaking a class you’ve already been throroughly trained in? Why, that’s a great way to get a better grade in college and have a higher GPA. Confidence is gained, professors might be impressed, etc. And the enhanced high school transcript still might be the tipping point to get into the selective school you were reaching for, even if they won’t accept the class for college credit.</p>
<p>Obvious, different students/parents at different schools would have a different feeling about this. Some students/parents would be interested in graduating earlier due to the cost of education. It is nice to get a better GPA by retaking a class and one may choose to do that instead of accepting the transfer credit, for instance someone doing pre-med and needs a higher GPA. So even the college allows those transfer credits, there are still other considerations.</p>
<p>Is DE the same as concurrent enrollment? Here it would never be presented is a real option to IB. Having been to way too many presentations on high school pathways CE is offered as a vocational pathway and IB is for academic students. As IB is offered in a few public schools it is not particularly selective and attracts the kids who will do the work. </p>
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<p>Actually, college courses taken while in high school are included in college courses and grades for medical school applications. This means that retaking them will appear as a repeated course for pre-med purposes, which is not a good thing. Of course, a 4.0 GPA in college courses taken while in high school is good for pre-loading one’s pre-med GPA, but low grades in such courses will start the student behind on GPA for pre-med purposes.</p>
<p>Alfonsia, yes, the same. The Seattle area and surrounding towns support nearly a dozen community colleges, several of which offer four-year degrees or direct pathways into specific colleges. To take classes at any of them in HS, your principal must sign off, and you must be a stellar student. There is much, much more than vocational education and many top students take classes at a CC, some even do their entire junior and senior years there. CC here is not considered a place for weaker students at all.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus At least AP credits are transferred without grades and would not be counted in GPA calculation. </p>
<p>S2 was a average h.s. student. Since it was free to take classes at our Comm. College, he took 2 classes his senior year. He left h.s. the last period of each day. One of his classes was a night class and the other only met twice a week in the afternoon. It left him w/ plenty of time to play varsity football and have a p/t job. He took a couple of AP’s but didn’t score well enough on the exam to get credit. The Comm. College classes both transferred to one of our big state u’s and really helped him out in getting all his credit hours in. In retrospect he wished he had taken some CC classes in his junior year. </p>
<p>ucb, I didn’t know that.</p>
<p>Powercropper, thanks for the nice compliment, but not really deserved. my son, like everyone else going to his college, had the chance to take exams prior to freshman year and place out of a class. His college classes were taught at a far higher level than what was offered at the local U. I imagine that everyone had taken science and math classes at an AP level or at a local U. </p>
<p>sseamom, I agree that these bright kids seem to enjoy the college setting. I sometimes think many 17-18 year olds could benefit from local colleges for a year or 2. In my parents’ day, it seems most people </p>
<p>My son took a couple of dual enrollment classes his freshman year. He made two As and a B+. He did this after school on top of his regular schedule, and it was just too much, so he is not dual enrolling this semester. He may take Accounting 202 next semester just to keep it from being too much of a gap between 201 and 202.</p>
<p>If a child is smart enough to dual enroll he is smart enough to take the classes at a full college. Many colleges will not accept credits from a community college. Likewise, most colleges will not accept credits from “dual enrollment” courses taught within a high school. These are not real college courses.</p>
<p>I think dual enrollment is great. Every course taken in high school is a couple of thousand dollars saved.</p>
The University of Michigan now accepts Dual Enrollment Courses from Community Colleges and other 4-year universities throughout the USA.
My Daughter will graduate High School with close to 47 College Credits (3 credits from 1 AP Class), which are ALL transferable to any of the 4-year Universities in Florida (including University of Miami). She plans to complete 6 - 9 credits at the Community College for Summer 2015, and will finish University at age 20, if she adds one or two classes to her regular schedule for the last two years of her undergraduate college life.
Dual Enro;;ment save us the parent close to $40K in College expense. None of the Dual Enrollment Classes cost us a dime…well she did spend $10 for a used text book for one of the Summer Classes she did. Our School Board does not pay for Text Books for Summer Classes, although the cover Tuition and other fees. In my book, Dual Enrollment is better than AP and is one of the best ways to reduce a student college cost/debt!
I didn’t want my kids doing dual enrollment. I didn’t want them going to community colleges, at night (we had no car for them to go during the day) and both my kids were very young and small. As a junior one was only 15, about 5’2" (and looked like she was 13). Nope, she didn’t need to be taking a math class at a college when she hadn’t completed all the math offered by a high school. I wouldn’t have minded her going to a regular college where the average age of freshmen was about 18, but not the community colleges available to her where most students are older (and scarier to this mother).
Sure, having a lot of AP credits or dual enrollment would save money, but so would going to community college for 2 years after high school, getting a full scholarship, earning money as you take classes. I really want both my kids to have the full 4 year college experience. For me, it is so much more than just gathering credits as fast as one can. I graduated from college when I was 20. I don’t think it helped me at all and I really wish I hadn’t rushed things.
Our public HSs are block system, which is not great education for band and sport participants who then only have 6 classes/year beside band or sport, and we believed our children would benefit from the private Catholic HS for many reasons including the year long courses (a few courses are semester long, but majority are all year). EC music and less distraction with big public HS. For friends’ kids that could not afford the private, they did the dual enrollment and knocked out all the college math (through differential equations) which helped make their college STEM curriculum a bit lighter - very bright kids who could get full tuition scholarship for college. Private HS did have work for grades, which assisted in the transition to college. Had AP history and english knock out those requirements. We took full advantage of education at HS, and paying for that did not want to also pay for CC. Both my kids had a bit of a breather for senior year, which was fine as they raised their ACT scores during first term to get better college scholarships.
It really depends on the school system and the student. Social maturity in HS. I believe in taking full advantage of 4 years HS, even if that means dual enrolling for two years with CC. Why miss out on EC or opportunities to explore electives or validating career options with maybe more time for college visits.
We have many years as adults. Don’t cheat a student out of experiences; however I do know some highly motivated and mature students who did finish HS in 3 years (probably not done anymore but know a gal that got her Master’s degree w/o HS or college degree - sped right through as fast as she could, and was very bright in her field of study).
Experiences don’t have to be gained solely in the classroom. I can see an argument for not entering the adult world too early, but at many schools (well, publics), taking a less-than-full class load can lead to significant cost savings. A gap year would mean no tuition paid that year as well, etc.
However, if you follow the link the transfer credit database at http://www.ugadmiss.umich.edu/TCE/Public/CT_TCESearch.aspx , you may find that the actual acceptability of transfer credit is much more limited than at many other universities.
For example, the frosh/soph math courses (calculus, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations) at California community colleges that are well accepted for transfer credit at UCs and CSUs are usually not given specific course credit at Michigan. Also, students in the engineering division at Michigan may find that the engineering division is even stingier with subject credit for transfer course work.
Students with college course work taken while in high school, and transfer students, need to be especially careful about checking whether their previous college course work will fulfill requirements if they want to attend Michigan. Otherwise, they may find themselves repeating a lot of course work that they have already taken.
Our S took one course at a college over the summer when he was in HS. It was in statistics. His grade in the course (A) was not considered in his college GPA. He was NOT dually enrolled, as it was just over the summer and he found the rigor of the course was below what he was used to in his private HS (he was shocked that the students and teachers didn’t cover what he had expected and the level he had hoped to learn in the course). He preferred the AP courses he took at the HS, which he took and enrolled as a freshman in college with the maximum # of credits possible from all his APs and he one college course he completed–60 semester credits. If your kid’s HS has good AP courses, it can allow your student more options and allow them to stay on the HS campus and enjoy time with fellow students instead of going over to the college or community college campus, depending on what best meets your student’s needs.
Introductory non-calculus-based statistics is usually not a particularly rigorous course (whether in college or as a high school AP course), since it may have a student population that is relatively weak at math but needs to fulfill a quantitative requirement for graduation or for a major (e.g. social studies majors).
My S will end up with a lot of DE credits at our California CC. I don’t think its a scary place to send him, even at night. But, I guess we’ll see what I think about that when my 6th grade daughter reaches his current age…
At his HS, the equivalent of AB Calc BC, AP Stats, and AP Macro/Micro are DE classes taught by CC profs on the HS campus. In addition, he will run out of HS math and science after this year as a sophomore and wants math each semester and science each year. The CC has math through Diff Eq. He also wants more computer science, and has already taken the AP CompSci test. So, the easiest way to do that and have it show up on a transcript is at the CC.
Also, his HS only has a 6-period day, and one period is used up by an engineering program he is in. So, since he wants science each year along with the other core classes and required stuff like PE and Health, he has to take something at the CC. So far, that’s been Biology the summer before 9th grade and World History this past fall. Neither Biology nor World History was hugely rigorous compared to an AP class, but he did learn a lot in both classes and enjoyed both.
We do not expect he will get college credit for all of these unless he decides to go to a UC. If he goes somewhere else, I imagine they will have a math placement test and perhaps a physics and/or comp sci placement test. That would be fine, because it should get him into whatever is the correct class for him is at that university. But, there are AP classes he has taken/will take that we also don’t guess will earn him credit at selective universities, even with a 5.
Basically, I’m really glad the DE at the CC is an option for him, because otherwise he’d be pretty much done with HS classes except for History, English, AP Spanish, and Health after this year. (UMich isn’t likely to be on his list.)
@ucsalumnus, your point is well taken, as I did take statistics for sociology majors and ended up helping tutor some of my classmates who were mystified by the connection between fractions and decimals and percentages. The thing that shocked S was that he considered the math in the college statistics class to be lower than what he remembered of 6th grade math, when he and his peers raced to see who would actually finish the book. He and two other boys were the only ones that year who finished the math book (including completing all the exams at the end of each chapter). The rest of the grade got about 1/3 to 1/2 through the book, which I believe was fairly standard. He had hoped and expected that more would be covered than from his 6th grade math text in a college statistics course. Most of the AP courses, he covered novel topics and found them pretty interesting and rigorous.
I think:
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Dual credits are un-even, their quality depends much on the colleges that offer them. They are not accepted at many universities, especially the “big name” universities, especially out-of-state. Dual credits are more easily accepted at universities from the same state.
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AP credits are a more readily accepted, simply because they are held to a more established standards nationally, especially the testing.
No question DE isn’t for everyone. In DD’s 3 year HS/DE career she has earned over 80 credit hours, mostly on the campus of a nearby 4 year university. The opportunity to develop close relationships with professors who have inspired, motivated, and advocated for her has been invaluable. A few have even offered advice through the college selection process.In a personal “shout out” to Kent State University, her Classics, English, and Psych faculty have been especially awesome.
Some of the problems we’ve experienced include transportation issues, GPA problems (in our state college grades are not weighted), There can also be serious problems for less responsible students who still need structure.
Benefits include truly challenging classes, a greater variety of classes than are available at high school. The chance to delve deeply into areas of interest, and sometimes credit or advanced placement once a student matriculates.
For my daughter who can only carry a years worth of credit into any of the colleges that she is considering, there are still lots of benefits…As long as she can prove mastery of the courses she has taken she will start with Junior level classes and will likely be able to complete her BS and MS in 4 years.
In my experience the difference really boils down to who is responsible for the learning ? many 17 or 18 year olds are ready to take the reins, be responsible keep up and turn assignments and they are naturally inquisitive. Those students would likely do well
Most HS A.P. classes are a bit slower paced and more regimented. The extra support of an A.P class adds rigor to the capable yet maturing student.
I was deeply concerned about the social aspect before D started at Kent, but I can tell you with no reservations, she was always treated as just another student by professors and peers even as a 14 year old on campus.
Dual Enrollment: not for all, but a great opportunity for many.