While you can’t control the cost of college tuition, there are smart ways of saving money for college that can start as early as your freshman year of high school. Read on to see how your high school academics can affect your college bottom line.
High School Academics Counts
Emily Sole of Traverse City, Michigan, handed over more than six hundred dollars to Wayne State University for a remedial math class that won’t even count toward graduation. She blames herself for not taking her high school math seriously. “I took Algebra II with a bunch of my friends and I just goofed off,” she admits. She took geometry her junior year but passed on math her senior year because she wanted to take more classes that matched her interests, primarily business classes. Now as a college freshman studying business administration, she regrets that decision. She spends five hours a week in a computer lab going over math basics she should have mastered already.
Unprepared College Freshmen
Colleges routinely test incoming freshmen to gauge how prepared they are for college work. According to a report published by the American Diploma Project and Achieve, Inc., almost seventy percent of college instructors reported spending time reviewing material with their students that students should have learned in high school. The same professors estimate that half of the incoming freshman class is unprepared for college-level math and writing. Why? Many college freshmen who feel unprepared for college admit that they didn’t work hard in high school.
How Difficult Courses Can Pay Off
Jim Levasseur from Mount Carmel, Illinois, took six Advanced Placement classes in high school and entered Bowling Green University with thirty-three credits. Since thirty-three credits is the equivalent of a whole year of college credit, he entered school not as a freshman but as a sophomore and saved himself an estimated $21,700 in out-of-state tuition and room and board at the school. Since tackling these challenging courses also helped Levasseur improve his scores on the PSAT, he earned a full ride National Merit Scholarship that will pay the rest of his way through school. Having the required courses behind him lets Levasseur take classes he is more interested in sooner, including classes in his major of computer animation. He can also register for courses as a sophomore honors student, practically guaranteeing he won’t get shut out of any classes. This calmed his nerves about making the transition to college. “It’s sort of like a big head start,” Levasseur explains. “I was confident in my ability to do work at the college level.”
Christine MacDonald covers education for The Detroit News.