Agreed, dual enrollment can be logistically difficult or impossible.
OP, you have a habit of posting questions with very minimal background information. I think people would like to help but it takes a while just to get the relevant information out of you.
First of all, are we talking about a current 15 year old who is just starting sophomore year in hs? Or are we talking about a kid in middle school? Middle school is an academic joke for many gifted kids. Boredom there is not a reason to think the kid needs to go to college early.
When you say “gifted”, how gifted are you talking about?
When you say dual enrollment are you talking about simply taking a few classes at a local college or online, or are you talking about sending off a 16 year old to college?
Why does the family think that the hs classes won’t be challenging enough? Are AP classes available at this school? Does this school lack higher level classes and high performing students?
If you want to consider Simins Rock, I would strongly suggest you visit the school when classes are in session, and students ON campus. It’s not your typical college campus. We live sort of near there. We have known several students who enrolled there thinking it would be the be all end all for their HS boredom issues.
Of course it depends on the child, the family, the school etc. but here are some comments:
–When I was in college way back when, there was a 16 year old on my hall. She was very nice, absolutely capable of doing the work, but she was always socially a bit out of place. I thought she would have been happier if she had waited a year before starting college. (I transferred from that school after freshman year so I don’t know how things ended up for her.)
–One of my friends had a son at Simons Rock for 2 years and he was happy there. Still, agree it is not a school for everyone so visiting would be important.
–Not knowing any details of the situation, I like the idea of a gap year or dual enrollment.
I have a relative who is in her fourth (and last) year at Simon’s Rock now, having started when she was 15. It has been very successful for her.
I spent a year in high school with a homestay program in Spain, in part to avoid accelerating through high school. (In 9th grade, I was taking half my courses with juniors and seniors.) I know lots of other people who did that, in my generation and since. It has generally been very successful. As several people have pointed out, living with a family involves lots more supervision and protection than living in a college dorm, but there is still an opportunity for massive personal growth living with a family that isn’t yours in a country that isn’t yours, either. It helps if you are pretty good at the language going in, however. Kids who don’t have a solid base often have a lot of trouble benefiting from the immersion experience, and some just retreat into a shell or seek out other English speakers.
I went to college at age 16, in another state (more than 1000 miles away)… and I did fine academically and socially. (Maybe on the social end my idea of “fine” might not have agreed with my parents – definitely high exposure to sex, drugs & rock & roll).
I did not experience any identifiable problems during the college years due to my age.
However, I did not want my kids to do the same. My daughter could very easily been fast-tracked that way, as she was a precocious early reader and definitely could have skipped grades along the way. But she herself made the decision not to skip to a higher grade at around age 7 (we were able to arrange a split school day with partial acceleration for the one year when there was a serious mismatch between grade & ability level) - and focused on outside activities (dance) – and in high school she spent a semester abroad.
I felt that the downside of the early college was two-fold:
My peers who were 2+ years older were more capable and competent in the employment market – they had a stronger work history which built on itself over time, and a better understanding of what employers want - so bottom line, I was at a disadvantage when it came to securing employment. (I got jobs – it’s just that my classmates often got better jobs).
Because I chose a straight line of college to law school – I missed out on the sort of experiences my daughter has enjoyed. In particular, she has traveled very widely and spent extended periods of weeks or months living abroad in a several different countries.
I agree with others who have posted that it’s dependent on the particular individual and their goals…but I’m skeptical of the language in the OP: “A cousin of mine is thinking of accelerating his daughter’s education”…
That sounds parent-driven – Dad sees daughter under-challenged, so Dad is pushing. That could just be an accident of phrasing — but It does’t tell us what the daughter wants. I feel that this is the sort of decision that really needs to be driven by the child.
@JHS oh I agree…Simons rock can be the right place for students. But I would visit before I apply.
Also, some parents have the idea that their student will be happier and more challenged in college, than by exploring options closer to home that could also enrich and challenge their kid. Some kids aren’t going to be any happier at an early college.
My sons teacher suggested Simons Rock for my kid. The last thing no I wanted was to send him away. Instead, he took 5 classes each semester at local college, while still being in HS for junior year. He only skipped his senior year.
Unless the student is unusually mature for her age emotionally and socially, I wouldn’t recommend it. There are ways to enrich a teenager’s life at home, and I think that’s the better choice.
I skipped third grade – something pushed on my by my parents and school – and therefore I was a year younger than my classmates all through the rest of K-12. I wasn’t particularly mature socially, emotionally, or physically, and I always felt out of place.
During high school, I discovered that it would be quite easy for me to compress the curriculum and graduate a year early. That would have meant going to college at 16. No way. I was already stuck going at 17; I didn’t want to be two years out of sync. I never even told my parents that the option of graduating early existed. I was afraid they would push me into it.
If you want accelerate your 16 y.o. minor daughter’s exposure to 18-22 y.o. students doing partying, casual sex, pot, etc, then by all means GO FOR IT!
She’ll turn 16 in first month of college. Her parents are our typical helicoptering Asian fellows and wouldn’t send her aboard by herself. They are also very frugal so private school is out of question. Her school is pretty rigorous in our opinion.
My son began community college classes at age 12. However, he began them online because I wasn’t comfortable with him on a college campus. At age 13, he audited for free a physics class on the campus of a Christian university. At 14, I felt comfortable with him taking classes (math and physics) on the CC campus. He took humanities classes in junior and senior year. When he ran out of math and physics classes at the CC in sophomore year, he audited for free some upper division physics classes in his junior and senior year at the local state college (went in through the back door), and worked online with a math mentor in some upper division math topics such as real analysis.
We opted to have him attend the CC part time from 7th-12th grade, and leave home (across the country) at the normal age of 18. He passed the proficiency exam here in California at age 12, so he could have started full time then, but we were not in a hurry. He did consider going full time to one of two local colleges three years early, but we decided that wasn’t the right thing.
I wouldn’t say he was necessarily academically challenged by the CC classes (pretty easily made straight As), but he was and is such a social guy, that we found plenty of other things for him to do to pass the time. He is one of those high energy kids that loves to do it all, so he played serious music (violinist, and self-taught guitarist, pianist and vocalist), he was an excellent baseball player, he was a competitive chess player, and he did math and physics competitions (these were probably more challenging than CC work).
All that to say-he made it work, and did not attend 4 year college full time until the normal age.
However, there are a couple of caveats:
He was homeschooled while he was dual-enrolled. Public/private school kids probably could not do what he did, because he had such a flexible schedule-really, a college schedule.
We live in a large city with three good community colleges within 15 minutes of us, and the state college is a 10 minute trolley ride.
Not everyone would make the same choice we did, nor do they have the same resources we did. So, to sound like a broken record, it all depends on the kid, the family, and the circumstances.
Our son is gifted and turned 17 the fall of his big flagship freshman year of college. He had done early entry to kindergarten and compressed his elementary years. He therefore was with the same peer group his last eight years of school (5th -12th grades). Holding him back to be with agemates would not have been useful. There is no perfect solution. Son could have had better HS grades but he was bored. Going off to college was much better for him. Plus, college kids don’t care about your age- and he was not the youngest in his honors physics class, that was a 14 year old HS girl taking the class through the youth options program.
It is a difficult decision for parents of gifted kids and there are many variables. Often being in the intellectual mileu of a good university is a vast improvement over taking community college classes- the peer group is different as is the intellectual challenge level of courses. Socially these kids are not typical and usually don’t fit in with the mainstream. My kid could not have been successfully home schooled- we would have butted heads far too often…
@calmom - we have a lot in common. I too went away to college at 16, then straight to law school. I started kindergarten early and skipped 6th grade. Perhaps because I had been with my older peers for so many years, I never felt out of place at college, socially or academically. No one knew I was younger unless I told them. The first time I felt my youth catch up to me was my 3rd year in law school. I didn’t feel quite ready to be a grown up lawyer.
I had a similar decision to make with my daughter and chose not to advance her. In hindsight, I made the wrong decision. She was bored in school and never seemed to relate to her classmates. She always befriended kids two or three grades ahead of her. While I was young entering kindergarten, D was one of the older students due to her birthdate. She also has a brother 7 years older so she had a lot of exposure to older kids. I think that makes a difference.
Homeschooling isn’t for everyone, but I can say that I didn’t homeschool my son in math after 3rd grade (he studied algebra that year, which is as high as I go as an ex-elementary school teacher), and other subjects after 6th grade. I outsourced everything or he self-taught; I considered myself a facilitator of his education. We used a combination of schools, classes, curriculum, tutors, mentors, co-ops and so on, and my job was to find these resources and materials.
But I digress from the OP’s post. Sorry about that! Back to your regularly scheduled program.
@Overtheedge – we DO have a lot in common. Your comment about being ready to be a grown up lawyer really hit home – I liked doing legal research and arguing cases in court, but I felt like I was in way over my head when it came to advising clients who were many years older than me about life problems. It’s not just a matter of knowing the law, it takes some life experience to be able to guide clients to good choices. So that’s a problem with a professional career – it’s also just hard as a professional to be taken seriously when you look really young. Perhaps I would have benefited by taking a few years between college and law school…
My daughter was very outgoing and got along fine with kids at school – in elementary school she’d complain to me that she had to dumb down her vocabulary when playing with her same-age friends, but she really didn’t mind. I think she enjoyed that she was something of a leader in her peer group. There are same age kids who she has known since kindergarten who were bridesmaids at her wedding last month.
So yes – it depends on the kid. I just had anticipated the likelihood of my d. feeling bored … and as I noted in my post, my d was actually given the option to skip 2nd grade and decided against it. Part of the reason was that she didn’t feel all that comfortable with the kids a year or two ahead. She was in a school with mixed grades, so she had been in a 1/2 classroom and could have moved from first grade into the 3/4 classroom. For her, it was a good decision overall. I know that there are things that she was able to do in college that simply would not have been an option if she had been under 18 when she started.
@WorryHurry411 – from your post #29 and the reference to helicoptering parents … it still sounds like a parent-driven decision.
I don’t think it matters much if a teenager who is living at home with parents is attending a local community college or university as a commuter --there are a lot of homeschoolers who sign their kids up for community college courses from middle school age onward. But I don’t think it’s a good idea for a youngster to go away to a 4-year college unless the motivation is coming from the kid, and the kid has a strong independent streak.
But you’ve described a kid who is reserved, “too sheltered” and apparently has very protective parents. It doesn’t really sound like she has had much of an opportunity to acquire the social maturity and resiliency that she would need if living away from home. It could work out ok… but a kid like that could also very easily be overwhelmed by the social environment and expectations at a college.
In a way I see the academics as the easy part to address - it is all the rest of the process of parenting the transition from childhood to young adulthood that seems so much trickier. The early college worked for me because I was in a very big hurry to leave the nest, and my parents were very wiling to let go. (It kind of helped that my mom and I had a very testy relationship… so both of us were rather relieved when we no longer had to deal with one another living in the same house).
Good discussion. I don’t think I would give much input to him unless asked but it’s good to hear percepectives of other parents, helps one see these issues from diffrent angles.
I graduated from HS at 16. As the son of a brilliant Aspergers-y physicist, I was lacking in social skills like the OP’s relative I had no real friends in HS. When I got to college (one of HYP), I remember thinking with real happiness, “There are people like me here.” I had made one friend at a NSF summer program in HS who was there and played a minor varsity sport so developed a set acquaintances, some of whom became friends as I developed the ability to interact. I had a couple of girlfriends in the last two years of college.
In hindsight, skipping grades did not do much for me in school – the kids weren’t any smarter, just a year older. But, as someone pointed out, I wasn’t picking up social skills at home, going to college early worked well for me. I was somewhat lonely and didn’t know how to create mentors, but I’m not sure delay would have helped. I consciously chose to learn social skills in college. Perhaps the OP’s relative could start doing that now.
the last thing I’d say is that life is not a race. I recommended to my son who is very bright but has severe dyslexia that he take a gap year before college and he found that of real value.
Personality plays a role. Stubborn, strong willed et al son acquired his traits from- guess what- both parents.
Gifted kids do not fit by definition. I do know when the decision to let kindergarten son join the first graders was being decided I saw the first real smile on his face in a long time when I told him in the car after the parent-teacher meeting. He enjoyed being with them and the next year switched to a different (actually closer- districting lines, sigh) elementary school to be in a 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade classroom. He was an academic mix at that time (not ready for second grade math, reading at a fifth grade level- got an honors math degree in college- go figure). I have may stories of his progress through school.
There are reasons for gifted education- it is not just grade skipping as most of the kids will merely be just older as stated above. But, I digress from the thread’s questions.
College allows students to find their own level. They choose one that is an academic fit then choose among the course offerings to get the academics that fit. Flagship U’s include the elite and more average college students. It can be wonderful to finally be among academic peers- and to discover many smarter than you are. The gifted students want much more than a social life in college. Why spend more time being bored? Also- I remember from my college days starting at the same time as those my age that I was not the typical college student at even my top flagship U. Thank goodness for the Honors classes and meeting likeminded peers. Staying in HS will not make a person have better social skills. One needs people like oneself. Peers at an elite private or honors part of the top instate school makes all the difference.
Remember- despite all of the hoopla about the social life of college it is primarily about the academics, especially for gifted students. Gone is the social scene of HS where students are confined to the building all day long. It doesn’t matter what 90% of the students are doing- you do your thing. Ask college students about their life and you will find as many answers as students.
For many reasons, I feel that we overestimate value of a gap year. I know at least two who are still trying to find themselves and never went back to college to finish their formal studies. Unless, someone has a good alternative to achieve or enjoy, it can be a risky decision at worst and waste of one year and rusting of academic skills at best.