Plan Would Let Students Start College After 10th Grade

There's an equivalent program in WA called "Running Start" where high school students can nominally attend high school while actually attending a local community college. They get college credits and everything. Often it's possible for them to get their associates' degree and high school diploma concurrently.

I too was a TAMSter in Texas. This sounds somewhat different, though, and probably in a good way.

The Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science is a program to allow students from the top 1-2% of high schoolers in Texas register in an honors-level degree program at the University of North Texas. All TAMSters live onsite at UNT in a single dormitory as regular university students.

This other program, in contrast, seems to be directing students to local community colleges. They would stay at home, take their general studies courses, and then transfer to 4 year universities when they had completed their two years.

The biggest difference is actually the living situation - home versus dorm. Not surprisingly, putting a few hundred post-adolescents into a dorm together for the first time who have been convinced by their environment their whole life that they are special and advanced tends to create a situation in which you have a bunch of kids with raging hormones who would like to try drunken sex from chandeliers and have hundreds of agreeing voices that their exceptional specialness exempts them from any rational adult thinking or supervision.

Needless to say, staying at home has the immediate benefit of dad coming after you with the belt if you try such things.

I have the benefit of two decades (yikes!) of hindsight in considering my early entrance experience. Would I do it again? Hell yes. Would I send my kids through it? Um, maybe. About 2/3 of my friends in the Academy were married by the time they were 21. Most now have kids that are approaching high school age. Being in our mid-30s, that makes us accelerated in more ways than one, some of which were not as desirable as others.

Although at 15 I would not have appreciated an early admissions program where I stayed at home, I think that a couple more years of rigorous parenting might not necessarily be a bad thing today.

tl;dr: Early admission programs differ in many ways, and due to those differences, YMMV.

This is what I did through the TAMS program in Texas. I highly recommend it!

I dropped out after 10th grade and went on to Iowa State. They had an 'exceptional student' admission clause, and I suspect most universities do. I'd taken summer classes there for a few years and had a professor write a recommendation, that combined with SAT scores seemed to be more than enough.

It worked out great for me, whereas high school was not going so well for me socially. I lived at home the first semester and then moved in with some friends. I'd recommend it for a mature 15 year old. But looking back, even for me, the situation could have gone either way depending on who I met at that point.

This is how it's done in my countries in Europe, especially eastern europe.

There's at least one college (Caltech) that will admit freshmen without a high-school diploma or GED. I'm not sure how common that is.

I just emailed my school district to find someone I can talk to about this.