Oh, I know. As mentioned above, I’ve been teaching AP courses in Title I schools for over a decade, and I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly (and the quick and the dead. . . ). There are certainly plenty of individuals I’d counsel to go to the junior college, or even to drop out entirely and go to junior college full time. Early Colleges can also be a great alternative.[/ quote]
I was one of the people for whom early college was ideal. Unfortunately, my high school had kittens because my dropping out would have reflected negatively on their overall dropout rate. Listening to them was the first serious mistake I made.
Very true. There is no way my college would have accepted credits from my local community college. And of all the AP tests I took, I only scored high enough to get credit for 5 classes. But I’m pretty sure the other ones helped.
The credit for those 5 classes didn’t help me graduate early. I would have had to double up on chemistry classes for that, something I would have had trouble handling. It did give me a little more freedom with class selection.
Others have mentioned taking the test when your school doesn’t offer the class. My school didn’t offer calculus BC or statistics, so I took those online.
We currently have a thread on the massive amounts of homework kids are getting these days. I certainly didn’t have hours of homework for each AP class. I couldn’t have done that.
My 8th grader has been doing advanced work (selected by NUMATS and Duke TIP in third grade) for a year or so. I just signed her up to begin Scholar’s Academy when she starts high school next year. It’s a two-year program that feeds into the International Baccalaureate program for years 11 and 12. It’ll be interesting to see how she does.
That said, she’s already done high school science, math, english and comp sci (that last is a joke, by the way). So it felt natural to push her another level during the transition.
I have a broad range of educational experience; I went to a very highly ranked public school(my parents moved to the area specifically because of the school district, and a lot of parents in the area chose to pay an out of district fee instead of sending their kids to private school). I got a 4 year degree from a decently ranked state school, now I am taking classes at JC so I can be eligible to sit for the CPA exam. I have taken honors classes in all of these. So far, the JC classes are not particularly challenging, and don’t place any particular emphasis on critical thinking - except for the accounting class I have which just involves a lot of homework. I’m also taking an honors course - the students in that class are very different from what I have encountered in the other classes. The particular JC I go to has arrangements with other universities in the area that automatically accept anyone with a certain GPA. So, based on my own experience, I pretty much agree with what you are saying - but the honors kids are really impressive, probably most of them will transfer to very good schools - I don’t envision the stint at JC as something that will slow any of them down; but the requirements to get into to the program are relatively high.
I think what irritates me about the “if you go to junior college, your sure to get the credit, unlike AP” is that if you can’t pass a given AP exam at the end of the year, you don’t deserve credit. They aren’t impossible tests, but they are thorough. Absent a significant testing issue, a kid that can’t get a 3 on the APUSH test really shouldn’t be getting credit for the course. The subtext to “you are sure to get the credit” is that a lot of junior colleges are very reluctant to out-and-out fail a kid in a freshman course if they have been more or less attending. It’s a mindset that’s more interested in checking off the boxes than in actually learning.
It’s also, as I’ve shown, incorrect: dual-credit courses are not blindly accepted, and have the disadvantage of being less standardized and known to other institutions. Junior college credits typically transfer very well to public universities in the same state–the further you veer from that situation, the more dicey it gets.
But that’s all that really matters with AP IMO: Getting the credit at the end by passing the test. Beyond that, there aren’t any benefits to taking an AP class that you wouldn’t otherwise receive at a local community college. What’s more, you’re guaranteed the credit after the six-month duration of the course in JC, and you won’t be killing yourself with needless rigor in order to attain it. From a practical perspective - which is the ONLY lens through which I view anything when it comes to education - the JC route makes infinitely more sense.
Note: As a JC student, I HAVE personally encountered a few of these high-school dropout/early-college enrolled students that you’ve mentioned. That kind of path is actually facilitated a great deal here in CA due to the CHSPE that exists in this state. IMO the path they’ve taken is the one that I wish I would’ve undergone, given that they’ll almost certainly secure a four-year degree sooner than most of their peers.
My kid’s high school offers AP courses, College prep courses (a little easier, but they don’t bother to prep you for the AP test) for kids planning on heading to Winona state. They also offer CIS (College in the Schools) through the University of Minnesota (Econ is not taught AP at our high school, its either a regular class or a CIS class for which you get UofM credit - there are a few classes like that - all fourth year foreign language, multivariable calc, stats), and dual enrollment through a local community college.
My son isn’t an AP sort of kid - my daughter will start high school next year. The parents I’ve talked to like the CIS courses better - the kids are pretty assured of getting the credit if they can pass the class (not a test, which encourages teaching to the test), its a college syllabus and a class that shows up on a college transcript - and its LESS work.
Some of what you are saying holds true from my particular experience. I am probably in a little different part of the JC curriculum than what you specifically are talking about; anyhow some of the classes I’ve taken seem hard to fail out of; a bare minimum amount of effort will allow you to pass - there is a distinct lack of rigor for sure. Some of the other classes I am taking though have a 60% failure rate, there is no hesitation to fail students. From what I could find, JC’s vary widely in how well they can prepare you for the next step. I think the one I go to may be a little different in that the credits transfer into some very good schools public and private, and a good student can move on to bigger and better things pretty easily; just something to think about for anyone who might be exploring their options.
I found that the workload of AP classes was astonishingly heavy (hours of homework for each class every night) compared to the equivalent courses in college (maybe one or two hours of homework a week per class), which were piddlingly easy. The things we learned were the same basic things - it’s just that the high school class had piles of homework and the college class didn’t. On top of that, a lot of people found that their AP credits did not count at whatever college they ended up going to (and if they did, they counted towards their electives). I felt I gained no discernible benefit from the classes other than a lot of stress and the realization that I could’ve blown them all off and ended up in the exact same spot I am today. If anything it’s only caused resentment as to all the bullshit that circulated around about what college entailed, what you had to do in high school, requirements, extra curriculars, etcetera when it really didn’t matter much. For instance, my high school tried to force me to take more years of foreign language than I wanted to take, because “colleges require it” when there were no such requirements at all at the colleges I was looking at.
I’m a strong proponent of state colleges however, and don’t see much point in shelling out for a “top tier” university. I’ve gotten a lot further on my state college diploma than a lot of people I’ve watched go to expensive schools.
And frankly, I think we’re pushing a lot of kids into college that have no real business being there. Not everyone’s a special snowflake and not everyone’s going to become a bio-engineer. A whole lot of kids are going to become absolutely average middle class bank tellers and purchasing agents who don’t need stellar degrees from stellar universities, so there’s no point in always pushing everyone to shoot for Ivy League schools the way my high school did.
Most people I talk to from my specific age views their diplomas as a bullshit receipt to get a job since most of their courses were academic and didn’t teach actual job skills - and since we all graduated 2009-2010 the diploma’s not been worth much to boot. Most of us simply wave the degree so we can get past the HR gate to whatever unrelated job we’re applying for.
The point is that the credit represents actual mastery of the material. I don’t have a problem with the junior college route–I have a problem with people who take the junior college route and manage to come out not knowing anything they didn’t know before, not having any skills they didn’t have before, not being any smarter than they were before, and who treat that lack of knowledge, skill, and aptitude as a feature, as a sign that they outsmarted the system somehow. Junior college as an alternate route to knowledge is fine. Junior college as a way to avoid knowledge (code named “work”) really irritates me.
Why do you think employers want to hire people with degrees? It’s because they expect them to know something and be able to learn more things. If you outsmart the system by getting the paperwork without doing much work (i.e., learning anything), you might get a first job, but you aren’t going to be good at it. And after that first job, it’s what you are capable of, not what paperwork you own, that matters.
It’s quite possible that you wouldn’t have found those classes “piddlingly easy” had you taken the “regular” courses in high school. It’s true that a lot of AP teachers over-assign homework, but its the weird nature of an AP class: high school teachers still bear a lot of accountability for student’s learning that college professors do not. In a high school class, you are generally supposed to make assignments that function as studying. You do homework instead of reading/studying. In college, the expectation is that it is the students’ job to master the material through whatever means they devise.
As even sven has talked about, evidence is pretty strong that kids who take rigorous courses in high school (AP or otherwise) do better in college. I don’t think you can assume you would be in the same place, or that college would have been the same had you had more time to smoke pot and play X-Box in high school.
I will absolutely agree that college counseling is generally inflexible, out of date, unimaginative, and counter-productive, and this does a terrible disservice to kids. On the other hand, the reason for this is that the college application/acceptance game is in a huge state of flux. There’s a reason that professional college counselors get $200/hour just to talk to you: right now that knowledge base is so esoteric that the demand for experts far outstrips the supply. Actual high school counselors have little training, it’s terribly out of date, and have no time to either keep up with the field, nor customize advice the way it needs to be done. It’s a serious crisis that leads to a lot of wasted effort, mis-matched kids, and pain and suffering. I have no idea what the solution is.
I was at a party over Xmas with a bunch of students who graduated in 2009. Most of them had jobs. Most of them had very good jobs. They were the type who always took on any academic challenge they could, ended up in competitive universities, and were recruited by top firms as they graduated. A tough labor market means having skills, connections, and intelligence matters MORE, not less.
Given that my high school literally made me want to suicide from the stress and depression it caused in me, I’m pretty sure my life would have been loads better if I had taken it easier then. I am thankful every single day I remember that I never have to go to school again. I can tell you for a fact that I did better in college because I wasn’t dying under busywork, not because high school prepared me. My high school didn’t have a single class directly related to my major.
In the meantime, my friends who went on in fields like chemistry, biology, and physics at top universities have ended up either working as a retail clerk in a mall or going on to do what they were hoping for. They all seemed to work the same amount. They all tried to shoot for the stars. Yet some are doing great and others aren’t. From our perspective, without the connections to people on the inside of these companies the diploma’s just a piece of paper for HR to check off. The guy who works at NASA? Well his dad got him in there. He was a pot-smoking slacker up until then. Doesn’t make the rat race look appealing when the person who double-majored in chemistry and biology is working at a mall because her parents are just average joes.
The folks I know who did average throughout high school and college, obtained liberal arts degrees, and went to public state schools have gotten those nice middle-class jobs as HR, paralegals, purchasing agents, bank tellers, etcetera and are quite happy with themselves.
What that says to me is all the hard work, money, and effort doesn’t mean shit if you’re not some professor’s favorite, your parents can afford to pay you through internships, and/or your parents themselves are high up.
I will concede that I’m terribly biased and cynical about the process but hey…it’s IMHO.
Do you not see a potential correlation between your “means to an end” attitude and your current situation?
But honestly, give it some time. These days it takes most graduates quite a few years of paying dues until they get on their feet and get in to a job where their education matters. From the ground, it may look like you are going nowhere. But if you are bright and hard working, eventually you’ll land a position where that shines through and translates into opportunity. Landing that early career position is usually luck, but your education will come into play translating that into a mid-career role.
Your sample of selected students is not random and has no way of of separating lurking variables in order to establish a clear explanatory/reactionary relationship between taking AP courses and job success. Furthermore, this is clearly an observational analysis and as such has highly dubious validity. I learned me that in this here statistics course I be studyin for.
Oh, I’m going places. That’s because I apparently chose a degree in secret demand (graphic design), and the studying of which degree gave me directly pertinent job skills. I’m already to the point where the degree doesn’t matter any more as I have a body of work and job experience to back me up. I’m comfy middle class, just where I want to be.
It’s my friends that worked their asses off to try and be stars in the “good fields” that ended up separated into the haves and have-nots I described. I guess you missed the part where I also described all my average friends who went to average schools and did average work there ended up in comfy middle-class positions pretty much across the board?
Having anecdotes like this is typically worse than having no data at all. Better to be pig ignorant than to carry around a handful of personal stories. Ignorance will lead us wrong much less often.
Lots of reasons for this. Most of all, our memories tend to be unreliable. Whatever we manage to reliably retain is subject to confirmation bias, since humans tend to retain only stuff which fits our preconceptions. The anecdotes that match our feelings stick around, and any exceptions are ejected from the brain. That’s already a skewed sample based on well-documented psychological tendencies, and it just gets worse from there. Even if our memories were reliable in this sort of situation – and they’re not – then we would still be suffering from a grossly unrepresentative sample by looking at the experience of a single person and their friends. Since they’re likely to share many socioeconomic characteristics, their experiences can’t be relied upon for more general inferences.
And we’re still not done! Small sample sizes inherently have more extreme results. If we were to list the high schools with the “smartest” students, by any quantifiable measure, an enormous number of small schools would show up in the list. But if we were also to list the high schools with the “dumbest” students by the same measure, then an enormous number of small schools would again show up. Smaller schools have smaller sample sizes. Smaller sample sizes exhibit more extreme behavior. It’s hard to get smaller than one person’s observations. I see other people have made the same point, but it’s really worth emphasizing this. It’s not just that “anecdotes aren’t data”. Anecdotes can be much worse than data because our minds extrapolate too easily from the available starting point, no matter how flawed.
Any given study can have all kinds of problems, too. But looking at study after study after study, with careful scrutiny about what they’re investigating, is going to lead to more accurate results than any individual’s perceptions.
You applied this in response to Macca, but on the other side of this discussion, could not most if not all of Manda Jo’s post be described as such? I’m not saying I agree with the tone of what you are saying(I think its a lil’ harsh), but why call out just one person representing one side of the argument and not both people representing both sides of the discussion? Just curious.
We’re all in IMHO, where the opinions are made up and the facts don’t matter!
I’ve stated my opinion of the AP program: that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be and that I also don’t think it is a necessary step to success. If anyone takes my words as the factual truth when I’ve never claimed any facts, that’s their problem, not mine. However, my personal experience is what has caused my opinion to form, and as such I include it.
Hard sciences (and bio in particular) are not at all a “sure shot” good field unless you get a PhD or live in a research hub.
But I would guess your friends are also shooting for something different than a lifetime pushing papers in HR. A mediocre education can definitely, with some luck, prepare you for a mediocre job. But that’s not everyone’s goals.
A bit off-topic, but I also have a bit of beef with the mindset that being a regular middle-class office worker is a job that people should be unhappy with, simply because it isn’t as intellectually challenging or prestigious as something like engineering. Maybe it’s the economy making everyone grateful for whatever job they have, but any displeasure I’ve heard from my middle-class friends isn’t that they dislike the work, it’s that they dislike the people they work with sometimes. I wouldn’t care if I pushed papers for the rest of my life, provided I am given a nice work environment with nice people and given a middle-class paycheck. There is enjoyment to be gained in the knowledge that you are good at what you do and that it’s needed, regardless of whether “what you do” is big or small.
Several friends have agreed with the above. They don’t care so much what they do so long as they have time and money for hobbies and the work/people isn’t awful. Pretty much the definition of average. However, I’m sure there are a couple that are a bit disappointed and will eventually make moves upward.
Perhaps everyone’s opinion will change in 20 years.
