High School Success is Essential for College Readiness
Students who find success, in their first year of college, are recent high school graduates who were influenced, by their high school success. High school success prepares you for college in several interconnected ways. College should not be the first place where we expect young people to be adults, not large children. All student-teacher relationships change dramatically, as do expectations for engagement, autonomous work, motivation, and intellectual development. All of this occurs when, for the first time, many young people are experiencing significant independence from family and from the role of dependent. It is no wonder that the transition from high school to college is one of the most difficult that many people experience during their lifetime.
Because college is truly different from traditional high school, College readiness is fundamentally dependent on high school success. Detailed analyses of college courses reveal that a college course may have the same name as a traditional high school course, but the college instructor will pace the course faster, emphasize different aspects of the material taught, and have very different goals for the course. The college instructor is also more likely to expect students to make inferences, interpret results, analyze conflicting explanations of phenomena, support arguments with evidence, solve complex problems that have no obvious answer, and generally think deeply about what they are being taught.
College courses require students to read three to five books in the same time that a traditional high school class requires only one or two. In college classes, students write multiple papers in rapid succession. These papers should be well structured, well organized, and well supported with evidence from credible sources. By contrast, on-level high school students may write one or two research papers at most throughout all of high school and may take weeks or months to do so. Increasingly, college courses in all subject areas require research capabilities, the ability to read and comprehend a wide array of document types, and well-developed writing skills.
Most first-year college students work in groups inside and outside class on complex questions and projects and make class presentations. They not simply lectured to. At the same time, they are expected to be independent, self-sufficient learners who recognize when they are having problems and know when and how to seek help from professors, peers, or other academic personnel. As it turns out, first-year students need to be spending nearly twice the time they indicate they spend currently to prepare for class.
College students also face the challenge of mastering non-cognitive skills. They must, for example, make decisions about a career, identify and modify personal values, form effective interpersonal relationships, develop self-esteem and integrity, and achieve interdependence and autonomy. High achieving high school students do not have difficulty meeting these challenges as well as the demands of school.
Retention of college students is a critical issue in Higher Education. Academic programs continue to wrestle with this issue particularly in light of recent trends in college admittance, scholarships and tuition costs. A lack of persistence has generally been seen as a problem in completing college. High achieving high school students are more prepared for college, less concerned about financial aid, less apprehensive about failing, and confident about knowing more about the college climate.
In short, the similarities between high school success and college readiness are diverse and substantial. To be ready for college, high school students must find success in goal-oriented and results-driven activities. They must be able to use a variety of learning strategies and coping skills that are quite similar to those they developed and mastered in high-level academics and competitive extracurricular activities. As retention rates continue to fall and the cost of tuition going up, AP courses, organized activities, volunteerism, test preparation, college camps and supportive communities - play an important part in College Readiness.
