“We also wonder about the implications of coming home weekends- I think that what you say about disrupting her development as an independent college student is worth pondering.”
She’ll be with a group of other young students; they may be going home more frequently than most CC parents expect their kids to do. There’s nothing evil about going home on the weekends unless you’re the kid left behind in the dorms.
I think the living part of the program would be more like boarding school than a college dorm. They are 14-17 year olds. It’s not like she’s going away to UVa and living in a dorm with 18-20 year olds. If I’m wrong and she would be mixed in with the regular college kids, then no, I wouldn’t let a 14 year old do that. My daughter started college at 17 (and a very young and IMO immature 17) and it was really hard on her. And me. Academically fine, socially fine, but there were a lot of little life decisions she wasn’t ready for yet. Doctors, prescriptions, taxes, money and banks, how much to spend on clothing…just some growing up to do.
Would she be earning both a high school diploma and a college degree? If she doesn’t get the college degree, would she still be a college freshman if she transferred to another college? I’d ask all those questions. Most colleges don’t consider college courses you take before getting a hs diploma as changing your status (you may have enough credits to be a sophomore, but still considered a freshman for admissions and merit).
Many kids come home several times a month. My friend’s son picked his flagship in the town they live in. He lived in a dorm and came home almost every Sunday night to eat dinner and do his laundry. He brought his cousin too. If they had other plans, it was not a big deal to skip a week (except for the laundry part). My nephew attends a school about 45 minutes away. Again, comes home all the time or his parents visit him and take him to brunch. All very normal.
@tupelokids Sounds like a typical bright kid/average high school situation. Would extremely strongly advise against starting college at 14 even if your daughter was among the most academically advanced in the country (e.g. qualified for JHU SET) and with your having listed AP AB calc rather than BC, it doesn’t sound as if she quite falls in to that category anyway. Much better to remain in HS and find some challenging enrichment opportunities or college classes. Then graduate at an appropriate age and aim for top tier universities.
If she is really not being challenged at her HS then I suggest you investigate Stanford’s online HS for gifted learners.
While that is the case for some who start college at 17, that’s not necessarily the case with all who started college at 17 or even younger.
I started college at 17 and had no issues despite the fact my parents didn’t have the means to pay one red cent towards my college expenses.
And the college classmates who started college at 14 or younger were actually far better at taking care of all those things than many traditionally aged classmates…or some older ones who were on the effective 5+ year college plan for that matter.
I would not call 4 APs as a freshman “Typical bright”. Many high schools make you take AB Calc first, so I would not hold that against her. I think she may like Mary Baldwin a lot and it sounds like they’ve got a core group of smart young women. I had a wonderful experience at an all girls high school with a very bright group of girls. I think there’s a good chance this may be a very good fit. My only concern is MB has not got a lot of name recognition.
My dh’s roommate was a 15 year old freshman at Harvard. I had no idea he was so young when I met him as a 16 year old sophomore. He was a very nerdy/geeky math major, but no more so than my dh’s other roommates.
I have a friend whose D went to MBU at around 15. Honestly, it wasn’t a good experience and the parents wished in retrospect that they hadn’t done it. Their kid thrashed for a few years after getting out, although seems stable with an adult job some years later. I think looking back the parents felt like a more regular college experience in her late teens/early 20s would have been a better investment and better for her.
I had a kid who could have gone – but we decided to keep her in a local independent private school. She attended the Davidson THINK program for a couple of summers, and was a high performer in academic ECs like Quiz Bowl & science olympiads. She took up club fencing, and met some more intellectual friends there. She picked the hardest college (and hardest major) she could find when it was time for college, and it has worked out well for her.
OP, you know your daughter. She sounds unusually bright, and often those kids don’t fit in anyway anyhow at a regular school. While I think personal growth is important, if her intellect is distancing her from classmates, there’s little reason to think you’re giving up a great social experience in high school by pulling her out.
If she feels like the other kids at MB are her tribe and the academics are good, it could be a good change. I know kids who started college at 15 and 16. Some were well adjusted, some were not. Most remain more or less in the same camp decades later although it’s easier as an adult to be a tad awkward.
As with everything, it’s unlikely to be perfect, but if it’s substantially better than your current situation, it could be fine. Sounds like proximity to home and cost work.
We live near enough to the UW Robinson program for that to have been an option. Instead my son took 12 AP classes which were all paced too slowly to be challenging (and got all 5s on the exams). We filled in with things like Art of Problem Solving for AMC prep, a summer class at UW Robinson, some regular undergrad UW summer quarter courses, some JHU CTY stuff. The plus side is that he got to be a kid and now he is going to college number 15 in US News where I think all the other students will be much like him. My personal belief is that you have many years to be an adult and not too many to be a kid.
I advocated for an elite high school earlier and wanted to expand upon that. Academically, my S is very capable (SET by age 11, Davidson Young Scholar, etc). But we explicitly chose not to accelerate, because socially he is similar to other boys his age.
We instead found a top notch public school system where academic achievement is highly respected and where some of his peers are nationally competitive in some activities. There are dozens of school systems at this level throughout the country, plus probably a similar number of private schools at the same level. There is also Davidson Academy in Reno that caters to the kids at the 99.9% level and above.
We opted to spend money on tuition for a top private HS where S and D could be around other similarly aged, bright and motivated kids. S took many of the APs offered and even self-studied for a few more, plus took a college course when he was 14 over the summer. For our kids, we and they were happy to start college with their age-mates.
It sounds like others have found starting precocious kids in college at very young ages worked for some and not for others. Likely there are many paths and we all chose our best with the info available. Sorry, I do not specifically know the program you are considering.
I think the academic fit sounds fine – for your 14 year old. The problem is whether there is an opportunity cost in attending college now – she can attend a lower ranked, regional college now, at the likely expense of attending a more well-regarded college or university with greater resources when she is older.
And it isn’t a matter of necessarily waiting until age 18. I graduated from high school at age 16, it’s not all that uncommon for students to accelerate and finish high school in 3 rather than 4 years. My daughter essentially did that with her foreign exchange – for her there were still 4 years of high school, but the foreign work couldn’t be counted as anything other than elective credit, so she needed to figure out how to meet all graduation requirements within a shortened period. (There was a potential opportunity cost in that as well, given that it prevented her from taking a more rigorous domestic courseload, but it ended up having much more of a positive impact than negative on college admissions.)
There are kids as young as 15 (maybe even younger) who attend MIT. Whatever the social implications, those kids will graduate with degrees from MIT.
There is nothing wrong with a degree from Mary Baldwin … but I doubt that your extremely capable daughter would be looking at colleges with similar profiles if she were a high school junior developing a college list. When she is in her 20’s applying to grad schools or jobs, post-college, will she look back and regret her choices?
The answer may depend in part on her specific academic interests or likely major.
We are less worried about the opportunity cost- she’s been offered a large merit scholarship and with the rest of the aid package, it looks like we’ll be spending about 10K a year at MBU- far less than an elite private school. Even if she decides to stay for just one year and transfer to her dream school, I think we’ll still come out ahead financially in comparison with going the prep school route.
We have looked at both Davidson and Stanford. DD is certain that she wants to be a part of an on site learning community, and that an online school is not for her, which I can understand. Reno is too far to consider sending her, and she does want to stick close to home for the time being. We do supplement with Duke TIP in the summer and DH is the HS school math team coach, so we’re well connected with the math related contests and opportunities. We don’t see any reason that she couldn’t continue participating in AMC and the like while at MBU.
Yes, our school did require AB Calc. Since she’d not taken pre-calc or trig (she covered these independently over the summer) before HS, AB Calc made sense in any case.
Thanks so much for all the excellent feedback. At this moment, I think we’re leaning toward giving MBU a shot as a springboard, and planning on transferring after the first year.
The one thing I see in common with the really profoundly gifted kids is the lack of this elitist attitude. It’s always the kids who think they’re the smartest ones in the room who display this hubris, and it irks the crap out of me.
Mostly because these are the kids who get metaphorically kicked in the teeth when they get out into the real world and have to throw down against the people who REALLY know their stuff-those are the ones that are humble, can work with all different types of people, and never sigh about how boring the world is because it runs so much slower than they do…
The Mary Baldwin requirements are not that, um, rigorous, imo:
Whole lot of fuzzy words like “excellent” and “strong”, but not a lot of really hard, nitty gritty qualifications for someone who is “profoundly gifted”. Compare this to the Davidson Institute in Reno-that one is no fooling, serious crazy high numbers to get in. And it’s much more focused on the kid rather than the “experience”.
To compare with Davidson’s:
"and planning on transferring after the first year. "
BE VERY CAREFUL with that thinking!!
MOST colleges do NOT offer merit scholarships to transfer students!!
They are reserved for top Freshman applicants that they REALLY want to enroll.
And many top colleges have transfer acceptance rates that are a FRACTION of their Freshman acceptance %'s.
So if you NEED merit $$ to be able to have her enroll at MB, you may be sabotaging her ability to transfer to another college because you many not be able to afford it!!
As the parent of a profoundly gifted child, I think that this is an extremely difficult group to deal with because they are so asynchronous in their development, and so intense in their nature. It’s tough to hold them back, and are to find programs and opportunities that provide the right combination of advancement, stimulation, and an appropriate social environment. I think that every family with these kids has to find their own way, and there is no one “right” solution.
My own 11 year had college-level abilities in some areas, but is by no means ready in terms of overall intellectual ability or maturity (even though he does many activities with college level kids or adults, and seems to deal with them much more easily than kids his own age). I can imagine him graduating a year early, but for at least 5 more years I need to find ways to keep him challenged and growing, while maturing and learning how to deal with a world in which he will always be an outlier. I don’t think accelerating into college would be a good choice at all. I’m looking at an approach more like @hebegebe’s.
I’m not generally a big fan of the early college path, and have seen several profoundly gifted kids who have struggled with it. It may make sense for the OP’s daughter, but there are a lot of factors to consider. At age 14, it would probably be a matter of keeping her properly stimulated for another year or two before she would be ready to apply to any school in the country. Once she commits down the college path, there’s no going back; she would be applying as a transfer student, which is generally a much harder path, as others have pointed out. But the biggest question to me is what does the OP’s daughter want to do after college. Most 18 year olds don’t know, much less a 14 year old. Rushing a “quirky” “out of the box” 14 year old into the “real world” by age 18 may not be in her best long-term interest, even if she finds the short-term environment gratifying. Graduate or professional school may help prolong the time until she needs to deal with a world that will not be full of similarly gifted individuals, but at some point she’ll need to learn how to adapt.
The OP has clearly thought about a lot of the issues (including finances and distance from home), and looked at many of the alternatives, so there may not be a better option in this case, but these are considerations that need to be thought out in advance.
For our S who scored the 2nd highest in the state among 7th and 8th graders on SAT, while going to a private HS WAS expensive, it did allow him to stay with age mates and take a lot of AP courses and enter college with a generous merit award with his age mates. It gave him time for his social skills to catch up with his mental abilities and have a very happy 4 years in college. He entered his U with the max 60 credits as a freshman.
It sounds like OP has given this a lot of thought. Please explore with target transfer Us what merit awards are even available to transfer students before you assume that transferring us financially feasible.
Some HSs & Us have “running start” which allows dual enrollment (HS & college) but allows kids to keep their status as entering freshmen rather than transfers.
If federal financial aid might ever be needed, the OP needs to find out if the daughter can be awarded a high school diploma equivalency while in this program. That will be necessary to file the FAFSA.
@tupelokids re posts #31 & 32. I raised a point about “opportunity cost” and you responded with comments about finances. I don’t know if you just read my post hurriedly or are unfamiliar with an economic term of art, but “opportunity cost” does not refer to finances. It is a reference to what potential future benefit may be given up with a particular choice. In the case of my post, it is the quality and rigor of college level academics she might experience at a more selective college or university.
I’m not advocating one choice or another. I did feel based on my own experience as very young college student and later, law school grad, that I was at a serious competitive disadvantage to my classmates in terms of career opportunities, resulting from a combination of my lack of maturity and real-world work experience.
I also think that my own daughter, who was age 18 when she started college, was able to make much more of her experience than I had – both academically and in the ability to take advantages of all the resources her college & university offered.
No one can see the future and each student has their own path to follow, – but those are examples of what I see as an opportunity cost for opting for early college vs. choosing to explore other avenues of enrichment or challenge rather than taking an accelerated, linear path to a degree.
Since you are in VA, are any of the governor magnet schools an option? Kids do travel quite a long way for those.
I think @MotherOfDragons comment is key. I am not sure your dd is going to find MB a hotbed of intellectual stimulation. She might find she has just traded one lackluster situation for another bc the admission threshold is not high and the student body is small.
I know other posters disagreed with @tdy123’s comment, but I personally think it contains some nuggets worth contemplating bc with the list of APs completed, your dd is a long way from having exhausted high school level courses. She might gain immediate satisfaction by escaping the high school, but the long-term consequences, the opportunity costs as @calmom points out, are high. Finding a way to accomplish academic challenge while still being a high school student is a solid option.
We can all only share our personal perspectives and experiences. My ds DE at local 4 yr universities. Through DE at local universities, he was able to take challenging, appropriate courses while still living at home and living the life of a typical teen. He graduated from high school having completed courses like multivariable cal, diffEQ, linear alg, 300 level physics courses, etc. When he applied to college, he was a very strong applicant and bc he DE, he was still applying as a freshman, not a transfer student.
Freshman applicants have better merit opportunities. (2 of our kids have earned full-ride merit scholarships.) Freshman applicants are eligible for specialized honors programs. Many of these programs provide faculty mentors, immediate research opportunities, special events with university officials, etc. These programs are full of the very types of students you say your dd wants to be around. (But to be competitive for admission to the programs, your dd would need to have a much stronger transcript than where she is currently. This is where @tdy123’s pt matters. She is not competitive now bc there are 1000s of advanced kids who stay in high school and graduate from high school at very advanced levels.)
Fwiw, the specialized honors programs also open doors on campus that a tranfer student is unlikely to equally match bc transfer students are competing against upperclassmen who already have relationships with profs on campus. That is an opportunity cost.