For 16-year-old highly gifted student, Dartmouth or Williams?

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She (and you) would have some responsibilities on the dating side too if she goes to college at 15. She’d have to tell others her age. An 18 year old could be charged with statutory rape for having a normal relationship with her if he didn’t know she was 15. You may think she’s not interested in alcohol or drugs or sex, but she’s 14 and in high school. Give it a year, a college dorm, and things may change, especially if she’s trying to fit in socially. You also talk about ‘her peers’ but what many of us are saying is that she won’t have 15 year old peers at college, she’ll have kids who are 3-6 years older than her and who may not be interested in being social peers. We’re telling you about our own experiences or of our younger kids going to college at 17, and that those experiences weren’t always great. I went to college at 17.5. The drinking age was 18 and I didn’t see that I was putting my friends in legal danger by going with them to bars and having them buy me alcohol. My daughter also started at 17 and we both wish she would have waited a year. Her boyfriend was 22 when they started dating, and she was just 18. That’s a big difference in life experiences (and my D was a very immature, physically small 17 year old going off to college).

You seem to be searching for the perfect solution without her making any compromises. She chose Russian at age 14 and that won’t work for the gap year programs you are looking at. How about French or Italian or Finnish? How about Polish,as Russian is spoken in many parts of Poland? My neighbors from Armenia spoke Russian.

Most of the kids I know who dropped out or transferred from their colleges did it for social reasons, not for academics (or the social issues caused academic problems). Smart kids who left Reed, Brandeis, Rollins, Washington College to transfer to a college closer to home. There is a lot of adjusting that happens at college that first year - sleep, medical care even for a common cold (she couldn’t even buy NyQuil for herself!), money management, food choices, home sickness, roommates, travel issues. Do you know that some airlines would require a 15 year old to pay the extra fee for an unaccompanied minor? Sometimes being 15 means you are treated as a 15 year old, even if you are really smart. No driver’s license, no renting hotel rooms, no signing contracts.

You asked our opinions, but don’t want to hear any suggestions that would have your daughter dealing with anyone who may not be her intellectual peer. A horse ranch? egads, non-geniuses might be there! Why couldn’t there be another kid just like yours taking a year or two off? Going to college near home? She’d have no friends. She wouldn’t be challenged. Do you consider all your students to be a lower intellectual class? If so, shame on you. You say she’s miserable in high school because the teachers are mean and the other kids tease her for being smart. Why do you think this will be different in college?

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I sympathize with OP’s plight, but the best solution I see here is Simon’s Rock. Daughter can be with other intellectually-precocious people her own age, in a program tailored to her academic and social needs. It might not be her first-choice college, or even her tenth, but perhaps he needs to make a decision for her; after all, she’s still a minor. When she’s 18 and has a couple years of college under her belt, she can consider transfer to a mainstream institution.

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the most useful thing I did with my daughter on her college tours, OP, was to leave. honestly. Almost every college looks fine with your parents along, and the current students will interact very differently with your daughter if you are nearby. The most accurate assessments of colleges came when we dropped her off at the admissions office with a map, suggested she find a place for lunch on campus, and hang out for a few hours watching or interacting with her potential classmates. I think that is particularly important in your situation. good luck.

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And considering some comments here and thinking of my own 16 years old, I’m sure I’ll avoid making any life-changing decisions for him against his will (advice is another matter). Social problems in college can be dealt with, but parent-child relationship is a precious and fragile thing.

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@roycroftmom, yes, indeed. If she can rent a car, she could go to various places by herself. Or we could go with her and just drop her off.

@twoinanddone, I’m afraid there’s some confusion. She’ll be 15 this January, midway through her junior year. She’ll be closing in on 17 if she starts college in the fall of 2019, after her senior year.

@BasicOhioParent, I cannot feel comfortable forcing her to choose one school.

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Back to the question of Simon’s Rock, a visit might be helpful. Many of us can tell stories about how a visit changed somebody’s mind, one way or another.

I must add that I was 17 for all but a month of my college freshman year. I would have been offended by any suggestion I was immature, and my parents weren’t concerned. In retrospect, though? Whew. I wasn’t ready at all. Additionally, the university I attended was all wrong for me. I should have gone to a small LAC like Swarthmore or Grinnell, not a state U.

I made sure my kids wouldn’t be going to college at 17, though they could easily have skipped kindergarten the way I did.

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@Gopies - As someone that started college at age 16 – and this was after only skipping one grade rather than two (which had been an option for my parents and which would have put me at college at 15) – I can say unequivocally that there is much to be said for not being the youngest person in any academic or social situation and for having more time to mature before starting college. I had been in gifted classes throughout elementary and middle school and went to a specialized high school for gifted students in New York City. I grew up WAY too fast – as a precocious (and overly rebellious and underachieving) teen coming of age in the 1970s, I was hitchhiking by myself through Europe at age 15 and doing all sorts of things that made my parents’ hair turn gray prematurely. At the risk of psychoanalyzing myself, I may have subconsciously felt that I had something to prove in terms of compensating for my young age and made up for it by being the first one in the room to engage in behavior far riskier than any of us would want our kids engaged in.

When it came to my daughter (who is much brighter and much more academically accomplished as a 19 year old freshman at Stanford than I had ever been even as a returned graduate student in my mid-thirties) my husband and I took the opposite approach. In making decisions about private vs. public school education, gifted vs. heterogeneous classes, accelerating full grades and/or individual classes, pushing her forward or giving her time to mature, we were advised that really bright (I hate the word gifted), high achieving students will thrive anywhere if they are happy and that being in a nurturing, supportive environment trumped graduating early. Consequently, we took the opposite approach and put our daughter in a junior kindergarten class (easily the most creative and nurturing class in town) and had her start kindergarten at age 6. While she could have skipped one or more grades any number of times, she did not. That said, she spent more time in the 4th grade class than she did in the 2nd grade class in elementary school, and took nearly as many classes in the high school as an 8th grader than she did in the middle school. To supplement what she was not getting in high school, she took summer college courses (not pay-to-play summer high school programs like Yale Global Scholars, but actual summer school classes), and did independent study / directed reading course with one of her teachers while in high school.

The single most gratifying educational and social experience throughout her high school career was TASP – the Telluride Association Summer Program for HS juniors. It is a fully-funded 6-week intensive summer living/learning, self-goveerning summer humanities program. I would encourage your daughter to look into that program sooner rather than later – the application requires a number of very long, very thoughtful essays and is due in January. Were she to be accepted, she would be among a group of exceedingly bright, highly motivated students with a passion for intellectual inquiry. And she will be in a social environment that will help her grow and mature.

As for college choices, it’s WAY too early to think about that, but no way would I want my 16 year old daughter at a frat-centered school with a lot of drinking (Dartmouth). I’d think pretty seriously about a gap year.

Just my $.02

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DH went to a highly ranked college at 16. Academically he was more than prepared and did extraordinarily well; socially it was “OK” - he survived, even made a few friends, but constantly felt the pressure to catch up. He regrets leaving for college at 16 to this day. Just another datapoint.

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@momrath, I just wanted to thank you for your post. A gap-year with multiple activities, some work, some not, sounds workable and possible. We are absolutely going to pursue a multi-pronged approach.

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@LoveTheBard, thank you very, very much for recommending the Telluride program. Since my daughter refused to take the PSAT, saying she didn’t want to receive all the excessive attention it could bring and the stress of taking it, we never heard about this opportunity. She looked at the website today and seems quite interested. I have also heard from her that going to Andover, if she can repeat her junior year there, might be an acceptable option. Yes, we are trying desperately to find ways to keep her from going to college too early. But asking about some preferred (by her) colleges in the middle of her junior year, if all else fails, seemed not terribly premature, especially as we’re trying to consider all our options now, before applications are due, as they will be soon with the Telluride and Andover options.

Without your recommendation, we would never have known about the Telluride program. It was so nice of you to write and mention it.

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@Gopies - My pleasure. It’s only fitting – we learned about TASP on CC, so what goes around, comes around.

TASP was, as I said before, the single most satisfying social and intellectual experience my daughter has ever had (and she’s had many!). It was truly a transformative experience. Fair warning: TASP is highly selective and only takes something along the lines of 5% or so of its applicants. I would suggest that your daughter spend a lot of time writing some very, very thoughtful essays.

Umm, no sense crying over spilt milk, but not taking the PSAT was a bad call. She now has taken herself out of the running for a National Merit Scholarship. If she ends up repeating her junior year, I would HIGHLY recommend that she take the PSAT. Also, she’s going to have no shortage of stress with standardized testing coming down the pike; the P is PSAT is for Practice, which is a useful thing.

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@LoveTheBard, we don’t believe in the current system of national merit aid, which privileges the upper socio-economic classes, giving money to students whose families don’t need it. (We also don’t like faculty at our large state school getting free tuition, and thus shifting the tuition burden to many students whose families can barely afford it. We believe it’s unethical, so we refuse to take advantage of it.)

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@LoveTheBard technically the P in PSAT is for Preliminary, not Practice. Also @Gopies I think the “current system of national merit aid” is mostly being used by colleges that want to recruit top candidates who might otherwise overlook them. Are you taking a look at Alabama or ASU Barrett for your D? The most selective HYPSM level colleges tend not to give merit scholarships and have so many NMF’s applying that it isn’t much help in admissions. It’s fine to skip the PSAT if you have no use for merit aid, but I don’t think it’s right to feel superior to all the families out there who can’t afford their EFC and would be more than happy to go to a school that gives significant merit aid for National Merit. Sounds like those schools are not on your radar anyway.

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@Corinthian - thanks for clarifying what the P in PSAT stands for. Given that I date back to the days when the SAT stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test – later changed to the Scholastic Assessment Test, and now just the SAT – it’s hard to keep up with all of the acronyms.

@Gopies - I find nothing unethical about the children of faculty getting a break on tuition – I dearly with that the University of California would sign on to such a program! Given how proportionally low professor’s salaries are as compared to those of administrators and industry CEOs that generally have far less education than faculty, I have no problem with incentives like free tuition for children of faculty.

And just to play devil’s advocate, if the tuition benefit for faculty at your institution were transferable to any other institution, say Williams and/or Dartmouth, would you also turn your nose up at it, preferring to pay full freight to not shift the tuition burden onto other students? In other words, if your highly gifted student could get into her dream school and not pay tuition, would you turn it down because you think it’s “unethical?”

If one were to take your argument about standardized testing privileging the upper socio-economic classes to its ultimate logical conclusion, why should your daughter then take the SAT or the ACT? They, too, privilege the upper socio-economic classes, don’t they? Perhaps your daughter would be best advised to skip out on standardized testing altogether and stick to test optional schools. (I’m not saying that I don’t see some major issues with standardized testing, but I believe that your argument is somewhat spurious.)

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Not taking PSAT sounds like a cop-out to me in this case. Afraid of not getting National Merit perhaps. Gifted kids can be perfectionists and afraid of “failure”.

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@sunnyschool and @Gopies - I wondered the perfectionistic piece after the comment stating that D “refused to take the PSAT, saying she didn’t want to receive all the excessive attention it could bring (?!?) and the stress of taking it.”

This attitude might not bode well for taking on college-level academic or other challenges, having to compete with other students at or above her level, etc. at a school where there will be no shortage of bright, high-achieving kids. Some of the ability to take on challenges might come with greater maturity. Sounds like this kid is a very long way from being college-ready.

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After graduating a year early, I took a gap semester (which worked out to 8 months overall), part on a farm in one country, part working as an au pair in another country, If it had been possible to do a senior year abroad going to school, I’d have preferred that. However, the experience was still invaluable.

One of my children is on track to graduate at 17, one at 16, and that was with only the unavoidable acceleration = could have accelerated more, but refused. I feel for you - I’m constantly running through options in my head how to decelerate them at some point, preferably before junior year, and at affordable cost, because there is NO WAY I am going to send them off that young, even if a school were ready to accept them.

That said, I agree with PP that your objections to all the gap year options suggested sound far fetched, fatuous even. There must be more options for high school seniors than Moldova (where I frankly wouldn’t send my daughter either, in fact I’d take that one right off the list) that offer scholarships. How much research have you really done? And have you ever studied a subject at a high level in a foreign language? There would be challenge aplenty, particularly as in most countries junior and senior year of high school are college track level exclusively. The equivalent of English literature AP class in Russian? She’d probably love it!
She’d interact mostly with age mates, of whom, compared to her high school, no fewer and possibly rather more will be at he intellectual level, and with her host family. She will not be isolated. She will sometimes be lonely. She will miss her high school friends, but she may make new friends. All of which by the way, would be true if she were to go away to College!
If you are uncomfortable with Russia, Ukraine or Belarus, you could look at Poland, the Czech republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Baltics. With the exception of some eastern part of the Baltics, she wouldn’t have much interaction with native Russian speakers, but will be fluent in Polish, Czech, whatever.
She’d grow and mature and go off to college with new confidence.

Living at home, working at the barn, training horses and riding and competing as much as she can would be a very different experience. She’d interact with people of all age groups, including, I’d imagine, junior and senior kids who ride on afternoons and weekends, and with family. She will miss her old friends but might make new ones. At least one weekend a month she could visit friends at their colleges. Some colleges might be very strict about no classes, others might not care about a few Russian courses. She could also take Russian classes online,
She’d grow and mature and go off to college with new confidence.

She could also try to delay high school graduation after all, and do as many dual enrolment classes at local schools as she can. She’d interact mostly with students somewhat older than her, of whom, compared to her high school, no fewer and possibly rather more will be at he intellectual level, and with her family. She will not be isolated. She will sometimes be lonely. She will miss her high school friends, but she may make new friends. At least one weekend a month she could visit friends at their colleges. She could ride a lot and still work at the barn and the family farm. If she met anyone from her old school being snippy about her not having graduated yet, she can either explain dual enrolment to them and talk about the college classes she is doing, reminding them she is only 16 and not ready to go away to school, or just tell them to eff off. Whichever feels more satisfactory to her.
She’d grow and mature and go off to college with new confidence.

You sound very categoric and dogmatic about your family’s choices. It’s okay to feel that figured it all out st your age. Don’t encourage her to be closed minded.

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@LoveTheBard Yes, and succeeding on PSAT does not bring “excessive attention”. It’s fairly minimal.

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Don’t know if anyone mentioned this in an earlier post ( I have not read the entire thread) Simon’s Rock of Bard is early college, located in a nice NE town and might be a good fit. I can tell you there are many Highly gifted there. I would also second the suggestion of a top boarding school. Depending on her gifts, she will be challenged in many ways and the curriculum can meet any student even one who has these gifts. In addition, they would have the support services that someone her age needs. Both my mom and grandmother went to college at 16. It isn’t a good thing. Even though times have changed my own parents held back and send us on a “normal” trajectory. I plan to do the same for my own kids. Granted we spend a lot of our own funds on extra activities ( many are very expensive). But some are not ( Math competitions come to mind). I think sending a kid to college early doesn’t allow them to build the normal cycle of competence and confidence needed to compete academically at the highest level. If you do decide to go that route, I would speak to someone else who started at the same age ( about pluses and minuses).
I am also wondering about the PSAT. In our world, winning a National Merit is not that big a deal at all. Are you sure she is nationally ranked in terms of academic skill sets? That is, are we talking about a kid with an IQ of 160+ or are we talking about a kid with 120-140 who attends a school that isn’t really challenging them? There is a big difference. Two subject years ahead is no big deal these days given common core. Notwithstanding, even the smartest kids don’t fully develop emotionally before their age. So you are relying on native intelligence to balance out the world. How will she react to sexual advances for example? How will she hold her own in class? Williams and Dartmouth are both strong schools I think she would be at a greater disadvantage in ways you haven’t thought through.

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when my eldest went to orientation at her college, the students all had fun taking the Rice Purity test, which I guess originated at Rice during orientation week as a measure of social sophistication and life experience. It is widely known on college campuses, and in certain boarding schools. My daughter’s group of 12 had test scores ranging from 27 to 92,so there was a broad range of experience levels; that said, I am quite sure my 16 year old would be absolutely shocked by the test itself, much less feel companionship to those with highly divergent experience test scores. My eldest was fine with it by age 18 (ok, she was a little surprised at some of the scores-accepting, but surprised). You might want to glance at it just to ensure your student is comfortable with that type of discussion among classmates, as I think it is not unusual and it would be best to be prepared for the differing level of sophistication she is likely to encounter. Academics aren’t everything.