<p>We live in NH and my daughter is 16 and attending Community College in Massachusetts. It’s a 40 minute drive to get her there.</p>
<p>There are several NH community and technical colleges that are ten minutes away.</p>
<p>I looked at the NH CCs and TCs many years ago when our son was taking college courses part-time and crossed them off my list of acceptable schools. UNH was fine but that wasn’t nearby. Our local NH CC has gotten somewhat better.</p>
<p>I think that there’s a lot of politics behind this proposal.</p>
<p>We’ve recently raised the age of mandatory schooling from 16 to 18. I think that it’s a major part of governors going after the dropout problem. The argument against raising the age was that if someone didn’t want to be in school, forcing them to go to school would be counterproductive to their classmates and an abuse of their time.</p>
<p>This is against a backdrop of lawsuits against the state on funding issues for the last 20 years with no resolution at this time and a difficult budget environment.</p>
<p>If someone wants to go to college at 16, the can. There’s a lot of paperwork to be done but it is nowhere near impossible. There are lots of kids at CC that start college at 16 and 17 and I assume that they’re from other states.</p>