Whiteflame128, a participant in my Admissions 101 discussion group, described what happened when he graduated from a Fairfax County high school and showed up for college enrollment with an entire freshman year’s worth of credit from Advanced Placement courses and tests. “My advisor had absolutely no idea what to do with my schedule at orientation,” he said.
Many students have encountered this problem, some of them in just the last few weeks in this enrollment season. All those extra credits, from AP or International Baccalaureate, don’t fit easily into the standard college schedule. They force newcomers to compete with second-year students for limited space in second-year courses. They aggravate the need to take less favored courses just to maintain full-time status. They waste time and money. What do to about this is hard to figure out. Most of the colleges seem to throw up their hands.
Admissions 101 participant grcxx3 said “my son and I were just caught off-guard about how difficult it would be to schedule classes for that first year.” Grcxxe said the AP, IB or local college dual enrollment her son took in high school meant he was “coming in with 18-plus hours of credit, much of which [could exempt him from] common freshman classes (like freshman English) and basic general ed classes that are often taken during the first year”
“At my large public research university,” said Admissions 101 participant bluewater3, “almost all of the students end up graduating with excess credits. Sometimes this is their own doing–they change majors or take an extra class because they really want to. Often, it is because for some reason or other they can’t take the course they need, but have to sign up for something to keep their full-time status whether it counts toward their degree or not.”
Another participant, amstphd, teaches at a college and has seen the unintended consequences of AP and IB: “First, the tests in those courses don’t cover the same content as [college] placement tests. English placement tests require grammar; math placement tests require computation. AP and IB classes don’t stress this content, and some students were surprised when they didn’t test out of the course. Students who do test out may arrive at college expecting to start second semester courses in September. That’s not what colleges expect. They offer some sections of spring courses in fall semester, but they don’t schedule many and the seats often go to students who were enrolled in the previous spring.”
Circumstances other than AP or IB credits also complicate the process. Participant mhoust said: “When I graduated with my B.S. I had enough extra credits that I had the equivalent of a Master’s degree. This was a result of taking years of night time classes while on active duty.
“Each time I was transferred to a new base, I had to completely revise my major, and transfer credits to a new school, all because I wasn’t ‘close enough’ to my degree to be able to finish it off with one school. It wasn’t until I was stationed in Okinawa for three years that I was in one place long enough for the University of Maryland to finally award it to me. The higher education system in America is still broken. People achieve their degrees and education in spite of the system, not because of it.”
Participant edgefield1 offered this metaphor:
Suppose you go to a Mercedes dealership. The salesman lets you test drive the car, you like it, and you plunk down $50,000 for it.
You come back the next day to pick up your new car, but the salesman tells you, “Sorry someone else is driving it now. Why don’t you drive this Hyundai until the other guy is finished?”
How would you react? How long would this dealer stay in business?
But this is exactly what the “institutions of higher education” are doing, and you sit there and take it.
“It’s OK to take completely useless courses for a year since there are so many fraternity parties to go to and so many road trips to take.” (especially if daddy or Sallie Mae is paying the bill.)
I’m angry that my kid is having to take a summer school chemistry class to graduate on time despite coming in with a whole year of credit. I’m also angry that the promised van from campus to civilization and campus activities on weekends (“No, this is definitely not a campus where everyone goes home on the weekend.”) never materialized and they essentially shut down the health center once they had my tuition checks (which get bigger every year).
Who’s watching these charlatans? What business raises its price 10% and gives less service every year?
And yet, all that confusion and uncertainty appeal to some undergraduates. Whiteflame12 liked being forced out of a comfort zone. “Partly because I had so many hours, I graduated a quarter early,” the participant said. “But in the meantime, I made a point to take a lot of courses that didn’t count toward my degree. Do I think they were unnecessary? Not at all. Very few of them were courses I went into college expecting to take, but I’m glad I took every single one of them. Now that I’m a graduate student I miss the freedom to take such a wide array of courses. I feel a little stifled, restricting myself to my department and my major field.”
Higher education experts have pointed out that enrollment difficulties may be a factor in some low-income students dropping out. The failure to get the courses they need, and the expense of lengthening one’s stay in college, become too frustrating. A few colleges say they have studied which courses are oversubscribed and added more sections to solve the problem. As college continues to grow in importance in American life, I hope more schools take the problem seriously.
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