"College freshmen are rarely referred to as 13th graders. And with good reason: The transition from high school to college is a lot more complicated than advancing from one grade to the next.
That’s been on my mind since reading this article about the Success Academy Charter School network in The New Yorker. The article, by Rebecca Mead, focuses on the network’s highly regimented educational environment, and describes its leaders wrestling with how well this model serves students once they get to college, where they will ‘have to flourish without constant supervision.’
Despite decades of work to cultivate a ‘college-going culture’ in schools and a cultural obsession with elite-college admissions, the handoff from high school to college remains messy." …
Seems like one of the bigger transitions is independent of the level of material covered in high school. That is the transition from the heavily supervised environment of high school to the college environment where students must do their own time and work management and have more self-motivation.
Would students who have taken actual college courses while in high school have an advantage in this transition?
While AP/IB/dual enrollment classes will give you a sense of what college-level coursework is like, I agree with @ucbalumnus that the student with the carefully curated high school life may very will be at sea when he/she realizes that in addition to doing homework and doing well on tests, he/she has take on more of the mundane things of life in order to be a fully functioning human. When getting yourself up for lectures, washing your clothes, and dealing with a bricked laptop are new and frightening experiences because you used to have a parent/teacher/counselor watching/riding/stepping in for you, keeping up with classes is truly a challenge. Yes, there are students out there who show up to college never having had to change a roll of toilet paper (I am not kidding).
AP and IB courses can give an idea of what college (frosh) level material is like, but they are still typically run like other high school courses in a more highly supervised manner than in college courses (and many AP courses cover material at a slower pace than college courses, so that a year-long AP course covers what a semester-long college course covers).
Look at some of the threads we’ve seen here. Without referring to any specifics, I’ve read at least one or two today that had me shaking my head-- and I haven’t exactly had hours online today.
The combination of a sense of entitlement-- I DESERVE an A, whether or not my grades measure up-- the number of kids who are in absolutely over their heads in spite of their laundry list of AP and DE classes, the frequent mention of asking for extra credit in college, the list goes on and on. And this is from a group of students who pride themselves, whose whole identity is frequently wrapped up in being far above average.
And how about if, just for a change, we blame the students? The ones who assure us that they can carry a course load of a million AP and DE classes, but who still haven’t learned at age 17 that the world doesn’t owe them those A’s?
@ucbalumnus I agree with you - the AP/IB level courses in general are like baby steps to actual colleges courses with regard to pace, quantity of material, and instructor supervision. An A in a class/5 on the test does not mean you will waltz into the same class on a college campus and get the same results without doing some work. This comes as quite a shock to many college freshmen. It’s great to be able to fulfill college requirements with AP/IB test scores so you can skip taking them (and maybe graduate earlier or have room for another major or minor, etc.), but there are plenty of top schools that 1) don’t accept anything lower than a 5, 2) strongly recommend you take their version of the course, even with a 5, or 3) don’t give you credit at all, regardless of test score (looking at you, Stanfurd).
Blaming the students or the parents is a big philosophical question on autonomy, nature/nurture, free will and choice, and more that I doubt we will ever settle here, but I think at the very least we have to acknowledge that both carry part of the blame likely.
What you describe I think is far less common than what the OP presents, which is people who are overwhelmed by the additional parts of life beyond academia that were taken care of for them in high school, combined with a smaller support network when compared to many private college prep schools.
In that vein, I think that the best solution here is to start slowly pushing that autonomy sooner, starting after freshman year of high school. Not in all aspects and not at once, but I think high school should be viewed as the time to transition the training wheels off rather than a sprint to college where the best possible time is all that matters. High school is the time to make the mistakes I think. There will be mistakes in college too, but those need to be ones about career, life path, and those types of skills rather than the basics of living on your own. I think you can and should train high schoolers in that sooner.
Some action items:
Introduce more life planning, basic budgeting, and other life skill courses in high schools
At home, parents need to push cooking, cleaning up after yourself as a habit, and individual responsibility for grades and assignments
The attitudes of entitlement come from the constant help in high school. I think high school is the perfect time to bomb a course and learn from it, but of course colleges don’t think so. It’s about guiding that so it’s okay if a kid gets a C, because they will learn from it. I think the job of a good parent is to figure out when to let a kid fail and when to step in. Too many parents are stepping in too early these days I think, getting scared that a B+ will ruin their kids ivy chances. Only then can we successfully shift more responsibility to kids in college.
I’m not personally experienced with this fully as much as some and don’t mean to say this is everyone nor is this the perfect way, but I’d love to hear constructive feedback on the perspective I presented.
I believe my D was much better prepared than her peers who did not partake in an IB Diploma programme. There truly wasn’t much hand-holding during her junior and senior years but there was some help with time management and prioritizing which seems to be a major issue with incoming college freshman.
I, too, put blame on the parents who don’t embrace the philosophy of working towards independence during the teen years, far before the entrance to college. I shake my head at kids who can’t or won’t get out of bed themselves, prepare their own breakfast and get themselves to school on time, but the blame is squarely on their parents. How many kids go to college without knowing how to reconcile their check/debit accounts, how to do their own laundry, with no job experience?