ON SEPT. 16, representatives from many of Virginia's public and private universities, as well as community colleges, came together in Richmond to officially commit to Gov. Mark R. Warner's new plan to standardize an accelerated curriculum for Virginia high school seniors. A major goal of the plan is to keep seniors motivated prior to entering college. By providing a standardized Advanced Placement curriculum, it would guarantee that Virginians could enter college with up to 13 credits -- roughly a semester's worth of college -- already completed.
As of this year, only 75 percent of Virginia's public high schools offered Advanced Placement courses. Even among those that do, the number and quality of the courses vary. The Commonwealth has introduced a "virtual Advanced Placement school" online to allow students who would not normally have access to AP courses the ability to take them.
Beyond providing an accelerated program of study for high school seniors, it is also important to consider the program's other purposes. While making senior year more "meaningful," as Warner put it, sounds noble, will it really benefit Virginia students in the long term? How much is the program designed to help the students, and how much of it is designed to benefit the Commonwealth?
A key focus of the program is to reduce overcrowding at Virginia institutions. It is foreseeable that students entering college with a semester's worth of credit or more would be able to graduate more quickly, allowing more students to be admitted to the schools. An unintended consequence of the plan may be to reduce college from a four-year institution to one that could be completed in three years, or maybe less.
There are better alternatives to deal with overcrowding that would not require students to rush through their college educations so quickly. Many public colleges have adopted a trimester system as a response to issues of overcrowding. In this scenario, only two-thirds of students are attending the school at any given time. This system provides all students a chance to complete four full academic years, while allowing the universities to accommodate more students. There are also obvious benefits to a system like this with respect to students who wish to take the fall or spring semesters off to pursue academic-year internships or other endeavors.
Another of Warner's key points was that shaving off a semester could save families valuable tuition money. The concern lies in the fact that this statement necessarily sees Advanced Placement courses and those taught at the university level as equivalent. While this may be true in select cases, it would be difficult for University officials to equate a course taught at Virginia's "virtual Advanced Placement school" with those taught at the University or other institutions. The experiences are simply not equivalent.
While gathering AP credits in high school may allow students to fulfill general education requirements and bypass entry-level courses, this may not always be to their benefit. AP experiences, while giving an outward appearance of standardization, vary widely. The plan does not include provisions to standardize the teaching of AP classes throughout the Commonwealth.
Another of Warner's remarks is particularly troubling: "The next step would be to get the Harvards and Yales and schools around the country to pick up on this as well." The reality is that these upper-tier institutions won't -- they have no need to. True, Ivy League institutions are facing growing numbers of applications each year. But this only serves to make admissions to these schools more competitive, and to make their entering classes more academically accelerated. These institutions are not seeking out students who wish to spend only two or three years as undergraduates. This is precisely why most of them limit acceptance of AP credit to one or two courses, not applicable towards a student's major. This policy helps to maintain the integrity of these institutions' courses and a student's overall academic experience.
While students at Virginia colleges may use Warner's AP plan to help lower their tuition costs, this should be an individual option and certainly not the avenue that the Commonwealth should pursue to lower educational costs for students. Furthermore, it is ridiculous to think that decreasing one's time at college might somehow help him, or reflect upon him better, than one who completes the entire four years. This would actually disadvantage Virginia students with respect to graduate school admissions or entrance into the job market, in which those coming from Ivy League educations will serve as some of our toughest competitors.
Certainly something can be done to encourage a more meaningful senior year of high school without stripping students' college years of importance or purpose.
Todd Rosenbaum's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at trosenbaum@cavalierdaily.com.
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