I’m currently a junior at a very small private school. I looked over my transcript and it seems that I would only need one class next year to graduate. It wouldn’t be a problem to fit it in this year. I could reasonably graduate a year early as valedictorian of the senior class. I will have taken 5 (maybe 6) AP classes and one dual enrollment class. There’s no other classes I could take at my high school. The colleges I’m looking at applying to are Stanford, Harvard, and top-ranking schools. I would told by one advisor to stay a year and take classes at the local community college, but none of the colleges will accept the credits and I don’t need the high school credit. I’m academically ready and easily mature enough to move on to college. The question is whether or not this would hurt my chances at getting into college. What would be the best thing to do?
The best thing to do would be to take a Gap Year. Read The Gap Year Advantage for ideas. And top schools like Gap Years - the students are more interesting, more mature, more adventurous -in other words, it differentiates them from all the other top students who are applying straight out of high school.
so there is no more AP classes at your school you may take? Also, don’t focus too much on Stanford or Harvard whether they would accept the CC credits. Chance for getting into those schools are very low anyway. How is your test score and GPA? If you want to skip senior year, that means you need to start the college application now. In addition, you may miss a lot of opportunities for scholarships. Finally, meeting high school graduation and meeting the college requirements are two different things. You should check the HS course requirement for each college you are going to apply. Indeed, graduating one year earlier does not help much, if any, in college admission. It would be far better to accumulate more college credits, improve test scores, and write/polish the essays in that year.
It isn’t a matter of accepting the credits, it is a matter of presenting the strongest application you can. USC does have a program for strong students where you enroll as a first time freshman after Jr year if you think you would be interested in that. Also Simon’s Rock at Bard enrolls strong Jrs and Srs for college early and has a very good transfer rate to top colleges.