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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

If AP classes don't give credit, I wonder if this will lead some students to graduate high school after three years.

And get a jump start working on their Bachelor's degrees which now take six years.

Seems like the high schools need to add some more rigorous classes for seniors.

Why take any classes that aren't required? I get the impression that "education" is now a luxury and most kids today need to get to a degree as fast as possible so they're merely saddled with debt instead of totally crippled. In that mindset, the only purpose of high school is to either get into college or get into some vocational training as soon as possible.

Maybe only rich people are applying to Dartmouth, though.

A high school degree ought to be good for something. Students are entitled to four years of effective free education. If high schools can't engage them I think the government should be on the hook for the bill for the first year of college.

I would prefer they figure out why High School has become so devalued and fix that. We should respect both the student's time we are requiring and the taxpayers who are paying for a defective product. Buying students a year of college doesn't fix the problem and acknowledges that we wasted their time.

Seems like a high school diploma should guarantee a basic level of competency with literacy, math, and scientific knowledge. 2/3 of first year college students in the US have basic or below basic levels of proficiency with the English language.

My girlfriend teaches high school. Another teacher there teaches a class sponsored by a local community college.

The curriculum is strict, and the teacher needs a masters to qualify. And then the kids end up with real college credit.

I think that the quoted statistic is misleading. For the students that are at top-tier universities like Dartmouth, the vast majority of students are still graduating in 4 years:

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

I think that the 6 year figure is due to an extraordinarily long tail.

I took classes at the local community college at night of my Junior year in HS, and during the afternoon of my Senior year since my HS didn't have AP courses (heck, they didn't teach trigonometry or above in Math). It seems like a pretty good strategy then and it will probably be going forward. Community College tend to have better 100 level courses since you get a person hired as an instructor.

Graduating early just mean problems in the dorms and paying for expensive 100 level courses.

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