Hello everyone,
My son is a 9th grader. He has been learning Chinese for years since kindergarden, and he will take Chinese AP and SAT II in next few months.
Given he will submit Chinese AP and SAT II test results for college admission, will not taking foreign language classes in high school be disadvantageous when applying highly selective schools like: Stanford, Ivies, Caltech etc.
I have been searching school websites and did not find clear answers.
thanks
Is he a heritage speaker/do you speak it in your home?
He has been learning it since K and is just going to stop now? Or will he continue in some way?
Given he can demonstrate proficiency and explain that he’s had a number of years of Chinese, I don’t think NOT taking a language in high school for 4 years will count against him. Elites like it when kids take advantage of new opportunities to their fullest and will understand that this student has already taken advanatge of the opportunity of learning a foreign language in his orher community. IMHO
Has he been in an immersion program as a caucasian kid/non heritage? There are kids here at this point but I am not sure how the AP results are going to look for Chinese. Even if he is an immersion student and gets a 5 in AP at the end of 9th, he has 3 years to do a new language.
Of course, if he is heritage he should be taking another language all through high school.
Going to disagree with @preppedparent on this one. The tier of colleges your son is targeting will want to see foreigh language classes. If he’s demonstrating proficiency in Chinese at age 14 then he should start a new foreign language.
Agree that elite schools want to see students learn a new language. Even if they are bilingual and can pass the AP and SAT II for a language that is spoken at home, I would encourage them to take a new language that they haven’t learned yet in HS.
I assume your son is taking Chinese through a local Chinese school or you or your spouse is teaching him at home. If you are shooting for the highly selective schools that you list, proficiency in a foreign language per se is not so much a requirement as an indication of academic rigor and intellectual curiosity. Review these links for Yale https://admissions.yale.edu/advice-selecting-high-school-courses and Stanford http://admission.stanford.edu/apply/selection/evaluate.html. Other highly selective colleges will be similar in what they look for. Why would your son not take foreign language courses in high school? Will he be taking demanding classes in other areas to fill his schedule? Does he need the time so he can excel in some academic based extracurricular on at least a state if not national basis? For better or worse, Asians to some extent are compared against each other in the admission process for the highly selective schools (other than the UC’s and Caltech). By not taking a foreign language in high school, that may stand out (not necessarily in a good way) because you can rest assured there are a ton of highly qualified Asian candidates who also attend Chinese, Korean, etc… schools, and take Spanish, French, German, Latin, etc…
^indeed, OP’s son will be compared to other kids in his cohort in highly selective colleges, and other Asian kids are mostly trilingual or better. To make matters worse Chinese SATII has by far the worst score distribution. Basically, if you do not score 800 you are at the bottom half of all test takers. So, if OP’s son scores SAT II 800 he is indistinguishable from thousands of perfect Chinese score Asian kids who apply to the same schools, and if he doesn’t he is at the bottom of the applicants pool. Either way its not winning situation.
Posts above all gave valid points for the OP. Common App only wants the student to list the activities during the 9th - 12th grades, so your son’s master of Chinese can only be listed as a talent and not an EC.
Further, most Chinese American students I’ve known who is (or had aimed) aiming the top schools are all proficient in Chinese (learned from weekend Chinese school in their youth), and they also take (took) other foreign language in high schools, some even to the AP level. So unless your son is a non-ethnic Chinese American mastering in Chinese, he would be in disadvantage competing with other Chinese American students aiming the same spots at the top college.
If your son is trying to save his time on second foreign language to better himself in music, art, leadership, science, robotic… to make him stand out from other similar background applicants, then go for it. But if he isn’t, then he would be less all around than others who take other language.
Yes it will be disadvantageous if your son does not study a language in high school. His ability in Chinese will help in college admissions though
Many schools do not even count the FL if it is your family heritage. It would be a big mistake in not taking FL in high school in that case.
If it is NOT a heritage language then your child should continue with it, perhaps with one dual enrolled class each of freshman and sophomore year (or AP Chinese as a freshman and an upper level class as a sophomore)?
(It’d also be to his disadvantage since it’d have been 4 years between 8th grade Chinese and his college placement exam).
If your child is gifted at languages, why not encourage and develop that skill? Perhaps helping him continue with Chinese and pick another one (French or German, or Spanish ?)
It’d be too bad to discard it before high school simply because the level an 8th grader can have can’t be that of an older student - think of native English speakers, how different their skills are at 13, 16, 20. Some levels of proficiency simply can’t be reached by children because they don’t have the life experience and schooling older teens have.
Finally, it depends what your child would do: foreign language is a core subject. It shouldn’t be discarded for non core subjects, especially freshman and sophomore year.
Thanks everyone for answering my question. Chinese is his heritage language. So he is fortunate to learn it since young age. Our thought is that learning another language takes lots of time commitment. He can spend the saved time to explore interests in math, computer programming etc… I do worry when he will be evaluated for admission among other asian kids who are likely trilingual…
In that case, he needs to learn an actual foreign (to him) language and try to keep up with his Chinese past AP if possible (participating in language, culture, film clubs at his school, or creating them. If in an IB program he can take Chinese as HL Language B).
Remember that learning a foreign language is a core skill, like learning math and while your state flagship likely wouldn’t care as long as he does well on the AP test, top 25 universities/LACs will.
His ability to navigate between two languages will help him learn a third one. He can likely stop at level 3 since he has that level in Chinese already.
Admissions officers know that a high school education is very broad and that not every student can thoroughly pursue the topic they want. In my opinion, admissions officers want to see a broad high school education that hits all the major areas: Humanities, social sciences, STEM, and language. College is when the student deepens the interest
If it is his heritage language, I’m afraid admissions at top colleges will perceive that as a cop out.
Put another way, no college expects or wants a student to be a specialist in HS; that’s what grad school is for.
Note that furthering an interest is math and computer programming is, IMO, the antitheses of “setting apart” for any applicant; they are a dime-a-dozen applying to top schools. And I would not recommend trying to do so at the expense of a core subject.
At my HS, students who entered with a proficiency in a language other than English were “strongly encouraged” to fulfill their HS graduation requirements with a different language.
Agree with the above. Colleges look for students who excel in a diverse array of classes. They want to see applicants succeed in a sequence of foreign language academic classes from a beginner to a higher level (often level 4 at top tier colleges) class. Being a native/heritage speaker is not a substitute for this classroom learning. Students who look to develop “spikes” should do so by utilizing elective classes and extracurricular activities – not by forgoing core HS coursework.
No, top colleges recognize not everyone is a language scholar. I don’t think its languages per se, but colleges want to see top performance across the board then some spikes As long as applicant can show some proficiency in a language and separate himself from the pack in other ways, he’s fine without mastering another language.