My school offers a full time dual enrollment program in which I am still a student enrolled in my high school, but all my classes will be college level classes taken off-campus at a local university. I’m highly considering it purely to optimize my situation. Next year my planned course load is composed of all AP’s and only two of the teachers are actually “good”. I figured why not just take the classes at the university instead since they are all college-level anyways. However, I wanted to know how this would impact me when it came time to apply to different colleges. UPenn, Columbia, UC Berkeley, and Boston University are at the top of my list, but I’m somewhat apprehensive about how they would view the full-time dual enrollment. Will it be a detriment or will it look good? Will it have no effect, and they will just look at me as if I were a normal high school student taking a bunch of APs (since its basically the same thing)? I really hope it’ll have no effect and that my chances will be equal, OR that it will actually be beneficial (like they think I look like I challenged myself senior year)
Dual enrollment will be considered as very high course rigor.
Yes, actual college courses would be very high course rigor.
Note that some schools look down on college courses from community colleges or where the course is taught on the high school campus, but if you are taking the college courses on the campus of a four year school with mostly other college students, that may be more acceptable to those schools in terms of transfer credit and placement.
Be aware that many college courses cover material faster than the high school AP courses that emulate them. For example, calculus AB, statistics, environmental science, world history, either economics, any of physics 1, 2, C-Mech, C-E&M, psychology are typically year long high school AP courses that emulate the content of semester long college courses.