Gifted but young for college

[ucbalumnus]

@Marian

Highly capable students who take a lot of dual enrollment courses get a large chunk of their college education from colleges that are not very rigorous. They also enter full-time college as upperclassmen, not freshmen, which means that they miss out on the typical college experience that many young people value.

So ironically, what happens is that extremely capable Jane ends up taking half of her college credits at a community college while she’s in high school and then enters X university as a junior and finishes up her degree in two years.

Many students who enter as frosh with many college courses taken while in high school stay the entire four years and have the typical (for that college) college experience socially. But some of the courses that they take are more advanced ones than most frosh take. In some cases, that may result in completing subject requirements for their majors and/or general education requirements earlier, leaving them more room for free electives to take additional courses of interest in or out of major (or a second major), or more time to do undergraduate research.