I applaud you for looking into this in advance! D20 thought IB was the way to go until we started looking into it. The issues weren’t with the program per se but our school was pretty new to it and did a poor job with implementation and now that she sees some serious flaws, she is happy she walked away. That being said, she signed up for a few DE classes (which we had to pay for) when she wasn’t sure what she was looking for in terms of colleges and took a handful of AP classes. Now that she has applied to all of her schools, we can see that in the long run, it won’t really matter. The highly selective private colleges on her list don’t give any credit for DE classes taught in the HS by HS teachers, they give minimal credit for AP scores (she has all 5s so far), and they only give credit for high scores on HL IB classes but many of the ones they consider aren’t even offered by our HS and the ones that are offered do not generate high enough scores for the students to count anyway.
Wow! I didn’t mean for that to sound like a negative rant at all! My point is to review the classes offered by all three avenues and choose what looks most likely to align with interests, not based on potential college credit. D has been able to choose the classes she wants every step of the way and routinely checks with her GC to see that she is meeting the benchmark for “most demanding curriculum”. She finds out tonight about her ED school so I may have a different outlook tomorrow…