High School Diploma Not Required?

homeschoolmom
Thu, 24 Feb 2005 21:11:47 +0000

The law in NY actually did NOT require a high school diploma or GED for ADMISSION to NYS colleges.

However, NY law DID require that candidates for a college degree obtain a high school diploma (or equivalent, i.e., a GED) BEFORE the college could issue a college degree.

This led to some fairly silly situations, e.g., a college senior at NYU being told a few months before his scheduled COLLEGE graduation that the college could not issue his college diploma until he got a high school diploma or equivalent.

Never mind that the young man in question had done a terriific job on all his college courses, was on track with his college coursework to get his B.S in a few more months., and had already been admitted to several grad schools, NYS regulations at that time did not allow NYU to issue his college degree until he had a high school diploma (or equivalent.)

NYU is a private university, of course, but they were theoretically at risk for losing their charter if they granted a college degree to a student who had not already obtained a high school degree.

Now, in practice, this is pretty much a paperwork formality, because the State Education Department will issue a GED to anyone who has completed 24 credit hours of college work distributed across a cross-section of subjects and most students will automatically accumulate this distribution on the way to their college degree anyway.

Even so, homeschoolers and some other nontraditional students who had been admitted without a GED years earlier and who had done fine in their college coursework, thought it was pretty silly to have to apply for a GED based on college coursework at the last minute before their college graduations purely to satisfy this silly requirement.

It’s essentially a certain amount of paper shuffling, for most students, not really any extra college credits required over and above those required for the college degree anyway. But it is an annoyance, given the slow-moving NYS bureaucracy. And some objected to the “stigma” associated with a GED.

As a result, last September the NYS Board of Regents passed a new proposal which allows homeschoolers (and other nontraditional students, including those who just decide to skip their senior year of high school and go directly to college without getting a high school diploma) a way to get a college degree without technically having to get a GED.

One of those options is popularly referred to as the “non-GED GED.” Basically the student completes the 24-hours of college coursework that would have been required for a GED but doesn’t officially apply for a GED.

Other options include taking the Regents Exams (or their NYS-approved bypass equivalents, which are APs and/or SAT II’s in the same fields covered by Regents, a little known alternative which may be more useful than the Regents, because they are nationally recognized.)

Here is the relevant regulation adopted last September:
http://www.regents.nysed.gov/2004Meetings/September2004/0904heppca2.htm

It should be noted that NYS still refuses to allow homeschool parents to issue “diplomas,” even if their children pass all the Regents. They can issue something called a “Certificate of completion of secondary studies,” or some-such but they are not entitled to call it a diploma, no matter how many hoops their children jumped through.

So it goes…but the fact is, a diploma (or GED) is not and never has been necessary to get IN to a NY college. Until the Sept 2004 reg change, it was necessary in order to get OUT of the college with a degree, but you never needed one to get IN, as far as the state regs were concerned.

(Of course, individual colleges in NY and anywhere else were free to impose their own requirements, but there was no statewide requirement for a diploma or GED in order to get in.)

All clear as mud, right?