This article is adapted from Davidson Institute’s student version of “Early College – Considering the Options: A Guidebook for Investigating Early College Entrance”, part of our collection of free guidebooks for gifted and 2e families. For a deeper dive into supporting your gifted or twice-exceptional child, we encourage you to explore the full guide.
For highly gifted students, the ordinary pace of secondary school often proves a poor match for their intellectual level and developmental pace, compared with the fierce love of learning that is so important in their lives. It is this mismatch with the ordinary secondary school curriculum that drives many students to search for a better academic fit.
Students who are advanced academically often long for friends who are as personally mature as they are, who share their finely tuned interests and sophisticated sense of humor, whose quickness and depth of thinking equals theirs, and who share their mature sense of intimacy and loyalty in friendships. Many exceptionally bright students, throughout their lives, have felt more comfortable with adults and older students than with their age-mates. They anticipate greater ease in finding compatible friends at the college level than in high school.
Potential Advantages of Early College Entrance
If the following points seem to describe you and your experiences, entering college early may be a viable option for you:
- If even the most challenging courses open in your school seem to move at glacial speed and next year’s classes seem no more promising, the challenge of college courses may look very attractive.
- If you love learning – you feel a hunger to acquire a deeper understanding of your world either about a variety of topics or a few – and you enjoy (yes, enjoy) communicating your ideas by writing and talking about them, college study may be what you’re looking for.
- If you have a long educational trajectory ahead (perhaps you want to go into neurological surgery or obtain multiple graduate or professional degrees), getting an early start may also look attractive. However, this path doesn’t necessarily call for radical acceleration.
- If your current friends’ interests don’t match yours – especially if their priorities are less ambitious than yours and they are not very engaged with their studies – then college friends might be more compatible. Of course, you might look deliberately for a new set of friends without going to college early. You might look for a more academically serious high school, or join clubs devoted to your talent area, or get into competitions where you’ll meet other serious students. Loneliness may not be a good enough reason to skip high school, but it’s a serious reason.
Potential Disadvantages of Early College Entrance
If the following passages describe you and your experiences, you may want to spend some additional time thinking through the potential disadvantages of entering college early:
- For many students, secondary school (middle school and high school) provides special opportunities that would be lost by early entrance to college. Consider carefully what is important in your life. Are you looking forward to editing the school newspaper? Playing in the orchestra or jazz band? Competing in the Math Olympiad or the Intel Science Competition? Completing an IB diploma? Going to the Prom? Being valedictorian at your high school graduation? Spending a year as a foreign exchange high-school student? However, even if many of these activities and opportunities interest you, you may not feel it’s worthwhile to remain in high school for years to enjoy them. Be sure to explore what opportunities are open to you at the colleges you are considering – some of these, such as working on the school paper or playing in the band, may be available.
- If competitive sports such as golf or tennis, or contact sports such as football or basketball, are important in your life, you may want to defer putting yourself in the college scene. The physical maturity and size of the usual-age college student might well provide too much competition and even prove a hazard in contact sports. On the other hand, you should check out whether you could continue to participate in high school sports even if you are a full-time college student.
- On a more academic note, bright as you are, you may not yet have all the prerequisites in place for excellence in college-level work. This is not so much what you know, but how well you are prepared to cope with demands on a level you may not have experienced before. Working through the remainder of this guidebook will help you to identify skills and maturities in outlook that would be beneficial to you in a college setting. If they’re not in place, you may want to postpone entrance until you’ve been able to acquire them.
- Very young students, even extraordinarily bright ones, often aren’t yet comfortable with conceptual thinking on an abstract level. Logical as they may be, they are more likely to see relationships in the here-and-now, in a relatively concrete mode – and some need more time to mature in their thinking.
- And of course, the social setting is very different in college. Depending on the institution you choose, you may find yourself the only very young person on campus. At some colleges, almost everyone lives in dorms. If you’re younger than 16, you’ll more than likely be living at home. Dorm life often presents too many opportunities for distraction (and temptation) for the young student. At some other colleges, especially community colleges, few people spend any more time on campus than they have to; many of them have jobs or families to take care of. Even if you find a circle of friends with similar intellectual interests, the age difference will pose (not necessarily insurmountable) barriers to deep friendships. You need to face this issue head on and decide how you will handle issues such as not being able to drive a car, limits on the social affairs you can or want to attend, and situations that are risky.
- On the other hand, most of the highly significant experiences you’ll encounter during your college years will take place outside the classroom. Some will involve working with individual professors and their research groups; some will involve study groups you and your fellow students create informally to deepen and extend your understanding of the material; some will be social and academic opportunities to interact with people whose backgrounds, ideas, and values are very different from yours; some will take place during campus extracurricular or service opportunities in which you engage. If you are participating in campus life marginally as a young student and living at home, you may miss out on some of these valuable growth experiences.
A greater understanding of what you identify as advantages and disadvantages associated with early college entrance can assist you in the decision process. What you perceive as advantages and disadvantages may change somewhat over time. As such, we recommend that you investigate alternatives to full-time early college entrance.
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