Thursday

Dual Enrollment- Lessons Learned

In Tennessee a home schooled junior or senior in high school can take college classes for either college credit or dual credit. Scholarships are available to help cover the cost.  

My oldest child is a senior this year and takes his first college final exam on Monday. He's learned a lot of college level math and I've learned a lot about home schooling high school students. Everything he's learned is way above my head but I thought I'd share what I've learned:  

1. Colleges usually require an SAT or ACT score to apply to take dual enrollment courses- so plan ahead.  
2. A dual enrollment scholarship is a breeze to apply for online, and is a breeze to get.  
3. Most community colleges are also a breeze to apply to online.  
4. Your umbrella school may require you to fax copies of your grandmother to set up the dual enrollment, so plan ahead to leave time for registering for actual classes.  
5. Your umbrella school may rather arbitrarily decide not to allow dual credit for the class your child wants to take, but that does not mean your child cannot get college credit. Once again, plan ahead.  
6. When figuring the cost of the class don't forget to figure in expensive college texts and possibly required computer software.  
7. When figuring cost of the class don't forget to budget commuting costs. Oops, my bad.  
8. When scheduling classes don't forget that parking on most college classes requires a lot of walking- which greatly adds to time spent commuting.  
9. Keep in mind that some college scholarships will not be available to students with too many dual enrollment hours. The reasoning behind this escapes me. Our reasearch indicated that you only start running into problems if your child has upward of 9-12 credit hours of dual enrollment.  
10. Letting my son figure out how to not study well, helped him to learn a lot about how to study.

This is part of Thirsty Thursdays at Five J's

1 comment:

  1. Those are great lessons to learn. I'm a ways away from that, but I do remember hearing about dual-enrollment.

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