Experiences With Comm. College Classes Inside a High School????

College Search & Selection
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<p>My kids' large public urban largely minority high school is proposing to start offering courses taught by community college instructors inside the high school, for juniors and seniors.</p>

<p>Does anyone have first-hand experience with this approach, either good or bad?</p>

<p>At the same time, the school system will probably be laying off existing school teachers. </p>

<p>I'm fearful that the community college instructors may not be as good at teaching high school students than the teachers they will be replacing.</p>

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<p>I have taken many community college courses (going on 79 credits) while in high school, though I always went to the campus for them. I always found the instructors as excellent teachers, generally better than all but a few at my high school.</p>

<p>My girlfriend goes to a nearby school that has an agreement with the same community college. In addition to its students taking classes on the college campus, they bring community college professors to the school. Actually, all of their teachers are also qualified as community college professors. She loves it and thinks that the quality of teaching is far better than the high school she had previously attended for a year.</p>

<p>It will depend on the quality of the individual professors, but my experience has been nothing but good. If your kids are offered opportunities to take classes with college professors, I would suggest looking them up on ratemyprofessors.com. Many of the comments there are misguided, but you can generally tell which ones (all caps/no caps, no grammar, expects no work). It’s a good tool for choosing classes.</p>

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<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1020523-colleges-do-not-accept-dual-credit-hs-courses.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1020523-colleges-do-not-accept-dual-credit-hs-courses.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The above is a good link to discussion I just found on this topic. It is about the many colleges that do not allow a student to receive college credit from “dual enrollment” classes. Some people have apparently felt mislead that they did not know that so many colleges would not accept the credits.</p>

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<p>That list is not wholly accurate. Georgetown will accept credits for about four classes’ worth, and Fordham will accept a good deal of credits (provided they are taught by college professors on a college campus in a class of college students). I don’t know enough about other colleges on there to say.</p>

<p>But yeah, a lot of schools don’t take the credits. Many do, though. Most people I know doing dual enrollment are going to state universities, which guarantee transfer of up to two years worth of credit. I’m going out of state, and the colleges I’m looking at vary between taking a lot of the credit or taking nothing. However, I find that my academics were so improved by the broad range of courses and comparable difficulty, as well as the superior teaching style, that I was greatly helped by dual enrollment either way.</p>

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<p>Yes, don’t rely on this link too much. If you read through the whole link, some people have pointed out inaccuracies. Look at the specific policies for each college. </p>

<p>It appears that most public colleges accept dual enrollment classes, except some of the flagships. It appears that many selective private colleges will not accept a dual enrollment class taught inside a high school. Some colleges will not accept dual enrollment in any case.</p>

<p>To paraphrase a comment from that link: Some community colleges are trying to convince school districts to replace AP offerings with dual enrollments. That may be beneficial for colleges going to non-flagship public colleges. However, it may harm students attending more selective colleges. That is because more selective colleges are more likely to accept AP credit than dual enrollment classes taught inside a high school. </p>

<p>Some students would benefit from having their college credit determined by multiple tests in a dual enrollment class as opposed a single AP test. However, some students may also be surprised that a B- on a dual enrollment class may not be accepted at some colleges for credit.</p>

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<p>I don’t think schools should replace AP or IB with DE, but it’s a good thing to have available.</p>

<p>In my school district, there is one school that offers IB and some AP and two schools that offer a lot of AP. All of these schools also have the dual enrollment program.</p>

<p>Certain schools (ie, Harvard) will take some AP or IB credit, but not Dual Enrollment. My high school is in Florida, where all public universities have a transfer agreement with all community colleges. There are also some private schools (Miami) that do, too. So it’s a good option for people in my school who are aiming for a state school.</p>

<p>A lot of the out-of-state private schools I’ve been looking into will take a good deal of credit in certain areas. But even if they didn’t, I’d still be glad that I made the choice I did. Before I went full time dual enrollment, I took a couple AP classes; I scored 5s on the exams, but got Bs along with As in the classes themselves. I found much of the work (especially homework) incredibly boring and not challenging whatsoever. Of course, I had to wise up about school, and I did junior year. But dual enrollment really helped. There was no homework (except for papers that I enjoyed), and I studied things I loved. Five history classes, four literature classes, two writing classes, two philosophy classes, two sociology classes, two ecology classes, two math classes, astronomy, psychology, government, economics, and several others.</p>

<p>It’s a personal choice, and where you want to go to college should come into play. I’ve taken the most dual enrollment classes in the most subjects of anyone my school has had, and have maintained a 3.95 college GPA. When people ask me if I think they should do it, I talk to them about their plans. If they want to go to UF, then I say that it’s a great choice. If they want to go to Duke or Harvard or Georgetown, I tell them that AP is probably better for them if they want to go in with a lot of credit.</p>

<p>And yes, just as AP credit is score dependent, DE credit is grade dependent. Most out-of-state schools will only take As and Bs. So that’s also something to keep in mind.</p>