<p>Our school offers both AP and dual enrollment, which are cc classes taught in our high school. Some of the cc classes are basically alternate versions of fairly similar AP classes, except that students have to purchase their own texts. As far as I can tell, the AP’s are a little more popular than the corresponding dual classes. I know we’ve already spent more on texts for my daughter’s dual class than we would spend for an AP exam, which isn’t necessarily even required for her AP classes. She does enjoy her dual class, but it’s more a matter of a good teacher and interesting subject than the fact that it’s dual rather than AP. She likes most of her AP classes also.</p>
<p>Taking classes on a college campus sounds good but it requires a huge commitment from families, students and schools, which in many cases simply isn’t possible. My daughter did it this fall, and we had to deal with transportation issues (ended up getting her driver’s license and buying a car–this would not have been possible in her junior year), parking issues (ended up paying hourly in a garage), scheduling issues (just had to take a deep breath and hope that her schedule for her high school classes would work out and we wouldn’t know this until after her college class was underway and it was too late to do anything), EC issues (she lost leadership opportunities she might have had because she couldn’t attend meetings/events), time issues (an additional 3 hours per week of travel which didn’t help an extremely busy senior), and calendar issues (the high school and college calendars were not aligned, meaning that she had almost no days off to visit colleges).</p>
<p>Just wanted to add, taking college classes is really only possible if a high school uses some form of block scheduling (semester-based or at least A-B). If you have regular (50 min) classes which rotate around in different time slots on different days, it’s going to be awfully difficult to mesh with a typical college schedule. Many high schools will not be willing to give up their preferred scheduling to accommodate the desire of a small number of students to attend college courses. Consider also that the college schedule needs to mesh. My daughter is starting two study halls this spring, because none of the college classes she would have liked to take this spring were offered in the only time slot she had available.</p>