I rarely post, but I figure this might help people who don’t have the standard 4 years of foreign language in high school.
My kid took Spanish 1 in 7th/8th grade. A few kids were recommended to take Spanish 3 in 9th grade, so he skipped Spanish 2. I was a little worried he wouldn’t have a good foundation. In 10th, the school wanted to keep the AP Spanish Lit class alive (not well attended), so he took that with a great teacher instead of AP Spanish Language. At the end of 10th, he took both the AP Spanish Lit and the AP Language tests and scored 5s on both, so clearly my worries about his foundation were unfounded. He ended high school with 2 years of Spanish, but reached the highest level attainable.
Fast forward to college application season. I was a little worried about his unusual path with foreign language. He applied to many reachy schools and was admitted SCEA to his top choice, plus three other top 5 schools (when Columbia was still in the rankings 
) So you can spend hours parsing what these colleges say on their websites about academic recommendations, but they will make an individual determinations based on the totality of your student’s resume.
My kid picked his own path for ALL (but one) of his classes with no input from us. We weren’t thinking of the reachiest of reach schools in 9th grade. That only became a realistic possibility in spring of 11th grade, and by then, most of his class choices were already a done deal.