I enjoy Bob Herbert's colums. I usually agree with him 100%. Today, however, is different. Today's column addresses an expanding fad in education: college credits in high school.
He opens with:
We hear a lot of talk about the importance of educational achievement and the knee-buckling costs of college. What if you could get kids to complete two years of college by the time they finish high school?
What if . . . Uh huh.
This may be something new for Mr. Herbert, but it's not new around the country. I've seen this in action. The Times reported on it last year, and universities around the nation have such programs.
My cynical self says that this is "education on the cheap" for universities. That is, students or school districts pay tuition, but universities don't have to pay full-time faculty.
The counter-argument is, as Herbert says:
When these kids sail into college, they are fully prepared to handle the course loads of sophomores or juniors. Essentially, the students complete their high school education by the end of the 10th grade and spend the 11th and 12th grades mastering a rigorous two-year college curriculum.
The fact is, the students come out of these programs quite unprepared for college, despite the teachers' and students' assurances to Mr. Herbert. As a college professor I can't count the number of students who've come to me to say "I took college classes in high school, and I simply wasn't prepared for what college is like."
I watched a student at my university give a speech about her experiences going through the college credit program in her high school. She was giving the speech as part of a seminar to promote these programs. She raved about how much more quickly she'd be done with school, about getting a job, and about how much fun she had.
She finished by saying "but I was not at all prepared for college." She had done well in the 100 and 200 level classes she took in high school. But what she wasn't prepared for was that those classes are stepping-stone classes in college. They teach as much about how to study and learn a subject as they do about the subject itself.
College is about more that being in a classroom getting a few credits. It's about the campus community, the (at times) crushing workload, the subject-specific sophistication a college professor brings to the classroom, having a weird roommate and learning to deal with that situation, about sitting next to complete strangers and having to learn new ways of getting along while learning the material, and a load of other variables.
Most of these high-school-college classes are not being taught by faculty with terminal degrees in their fields--they are being taught by high school teachers with a bit of extra training. An expert with a terminal degree (An EdD, PhD, MFA, whatever) brings a world of experience and expertise to the room that a high school teacher simply cannot. I say that as a former high school teacher. And with the full knowledge that the vast majority of my colleagues at my university could not teach high school, either.
The purpose of college isn't to get kids through as quickly as possible in order to get them jobs. If we want to do that, send the kids to vo-tech schools in 11th and 12th grade. We need lots of computer programmers, mechanics, and all the other things that a vo-tech can train people for.
The purpose of a 4-year college is to expose kids to a broad range of new experiences, including the narrow band of classes that will send them on to be doctors, lawyers, historians, and engineers.
Along the way they meet people from around the country, they are exposed to a multitude of opinions and beliefs, they engage in civic projects, they experience the arts, they develop year-end projects for classes that are made possible by the resources and intellectual depth that a university has.
A high school simply cannot provide the experience that a 4-year institution can. To pretend otherwise is to do a great disservice to those kids.