Day 575 of 1000
This is the third in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college. The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.
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Kelly’s path to college started when she was 13 years old and she took her first CLEP test. She got a 68 on the Freshman College Composition test. A 50 is required to receive college credit. I have written a series of posts on how we used CLEP to organize and assure good depth of coverage for some of our homeschool classes. At the time, we did not really think of these tests as something that might contribute to Kelly’s early entrance into college. That did not happen until we enrolled her in the local community college full time at age sixteen. We found that the 44 hours of CLEP credit accepted by the community college meant she only needed one more semester to graduate with a college transfer Associate of Science degree.
We could have graduated here from community college and sent her straight on to NCSU where she could have graduated 3½ years early, but only if she wanted a liberal arts degree. There were several reasons we did not do that. First, she was young and the community college environment was not so overwhelming as the much larger NCSU. Kelly and Christian entered Wake Tech Community College at the same time and took most of their classes together so they were not completely on their own.
Second, we wanted Kelly to get a hard degree rather than just a liberal arts or business degree. Our thinking was that since she was so young, she could get a masters degree in liberal arts or continue with something harder after she finished her undergraduate degree. A hard, math-oriented degree is a better base for almost everything. The problem with the hard degree is that she did not have the prerequisites she needed to get through the degree as fast as she could get through a liberal arts degree. That is why we decided to leave Kelly in Wake Tech with Christian for the full two years even though she could have graduated after one semester.
We continued with a few homeschool classes in combination with the community college classes and used Kelly’s graduation with her Associate degree as her high school graduation. She continued to take the ACT college entrance exam each year to remain in compliance with North Carolina law that requires yearly, nationally normed, standardized tests. The last time she took the ACT before she applied to NCSU, she received a 34. The 34 was a very high score that helped her win the Dean’s Scholarship for the Physical and Mathematical Sciences department when she was accepted there as a Statistics major. Christian did well on the ACT, but nowhere close to a 34 as he was only an eighth grader when he took his final ACT exam.
Kelly is scheduled to graduate from NCSU in spring of 2014. This is about a year and a half later than would have been possible if she wanted to leave with a weaker degree and spend most of her school time on her own. We believe it was a very good move for Kelly to spread out her college over six years rather than just four. She almost certainly would not have gotten a scholarship, but more importantly she is getting a broader education and will finish with a degree that pays more than average and for which there are a lot of jobs. She will have many more credit hours than are required to graduate and will be well prepared to go on to a graduate degree in either statistics or a specialization area.
She should be able to complete all this two years earlier than the normal trajectory she would have followed had she stayed in a traditional school. We have no illusions that we are are smarter than other people nor do we believe that we work harder. We did not even plan particularly well. We probably could have gotten her through more quickly with higher educational achievement, but that would have been at the expense of some loneliness and family time that we value so highly. We are pleased with the way this all went particularly because Kelly and Christian shared the time together, made friends together, and were a great support to each other during the whole process.
The success of our plan probably had to do with tenacity and being the tortoise rather than the hare in the execution of our plan over many years. It had almost nothing to do with any brilliance of planning, parental guidance, or brilliant execution.