<p>Dear College Confidential Users,</p>
<pre><code>How do universities view a student that has graduated early from high school. Right now I have many credits and am optioned by my school to graduate early. I am a junior and next year I may graduate in the first 2 to 3 months of my senior year. However, if colleges view it badly I will not graduate early. Please help, I am in a awkward predicament. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Born2Win9
</code></pre>
<p>Did you take ll of the most advanced classes your school offers? Gain all of the leadership positions you could? Many kids could graduate early if they wanted to, but choose to use the extra time to strengthen their application.</p>
<p>Where will you be applying?</p>
<p>My impression is graduating early doesn’t make you stand out any more than a regular kid. I know a kid who graduated two years early. He didn’t make it to his first choice so he took a gap year and still didn’t get into his first choice. He is now attending Johns Hopkins. Another kid graduated a year early and is accepted to Vandy this year. And another goes to our state u. Waverly’s suggestion is very good. Staying the extra year, doing the things you like, taking more advanced classes, getting more involved… these things enhance your candidacy more so than applying early.</p>
<p>Some kids think that they are more mature than the other kids and tend to graduate early thinking that they can be ahead of others. Most H school kids know that the requirements to graduate is low. That means, if you are decently smart you can graduate early. But most don’t do this and there is a reason for this. Colleges are tough and people who mature at a normal pace are better prepared to handle the academic workload. Unless, you want to study cooking class or crafing class in college, it is not advisable to graduate early!</p>
<p>Waverly – Great advice.</p>
<p>A quick question, what if I graduated early one semester and spent my last semester doing something I like (ex. internship)?</p>
<p>I disagree with the others here. The reason most kids decide not to graduate early if they can is that they want to be with their friends and they don’t know what else to do with themselves. For many, senior year is academically and socially a time of little incremental value. Even if they are taking the most advanced courses and have leadership positions, they could get a great deal more out of working full-time for 9 months or doing an internship somewhere that allows them to test their interests more fully. Even doing this for one semester provides a huge boost to maturity.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t recommend graduating early to start college sooner - that extra time to mature and to explore the world beyond high school is very valuable.</p>
<p>This is an old thread, but the discussion is interesting and may be useful to others over time, so here’s my two cents.</p>
<p>Another possibility would be to graduate early and take courses at a local community college in the spring semester. Or to have some kind of split schedule – spend part of the day at the high school and part of the day at the community college.</p>
<p>I don’t think graduating early would negatively affect a college application. I don’t think admissions officers care about that. I think they’re trying to figure out who would sink and who would swim, in a challenging academic environment. As long as your application has clear evidence of your ability to rise to an academic challenge, it doesn’t matter where you established that evidence.</p>
<p>One reason some students decide to finish out the senior year in high school is so they can collect some AP credits. This allows them to take a slightly lighter credit load when they get to college.</p>
<p>That strategy would not make sense for a student who is not comfortable with the pressure to get a 4 or a 5 on an AP exam. Such a student would be better off collecting some transfer credits in a community college, since those transfer credits will be based on homework, projects, quizzes, and midterm exam(s), in addition to the final exam.</p>
<p>There is one strategy that I have seen backfire. An acquaintance of mine had a very light schedule his senior year and used that time to earn some money working at the grocery store before entering college. He suffered mightily through his first semesters in college because the academic work was so much harder than what he had been used to. In retrospect, he would have had an easier time if he had given himself some transition, either with a nice bunch of tough AP classes, or some well chosen classes at the community college.</p>