The Crumbling Boundary Between High School and College

By all appearances, students in the honors program at the University of Iowa should make a seamless adjustment to their college courses. These students, who applied and were selected by the program in a holistic process, have long been on the academic fast track. Many came in with college credits, often from Advanced Placement.

But many of these ostensibly well-prepared students frequently hand in work that’s superficial, professors tell Shaun Vecera, who directs the honors program. If students do the reading at all, they don’t seem to understand it. Essays and class discussions skim over the surface. Such concerns, of course, are hardly limited to Iowa.

But what does it say that students who have taken college-level courses in high school are having such a hard time with the basic components of their academic work once they get to college? It can be tempting for professors to see this paradox as an indictment of students or their K-12 teachers.

The problem may be the fast track itself, the one on which students find themselves and teachers help them move through. But neither group built it. Policymakers focused on efficiency and affordability, schools looking to remain attractive, and parents worried about competitive admissions and expensive tuition have made doing college work in high school a widespread expectation. As a result, Advanced Placement and dual enrollment now play a significant role in shaping incoming students’ sense of what college is and what it’s for.

Consider: Three-quarters of public schools enrolling students in grades nine or above now offer advanced coursework through AP, pre-AP, International Baccalaureate (IB) courses, or dual enrollment. Thirty-six percent of public high-school students who graduated in 2024 took at least one AP exam; 23 percent scored three or higher (generally considered passing) on at least one. About a third of high-school students take at least one dual-enrollment course, according to the most recent available data.

The expansion of early-college coursework might seem like an instance where everyone wins. Students get a challenge to rise to, stronger college applications, and potentially a faster, less-expensive path to a degree — all of which sounds pretty good to parents and state governments. Community colleges get a significant revenue source. Schools get prestige — and funding. Colleges get well-prepared students … at least on paper.

But there’s a downside. These accelerated programs can condition students to write in a particular format that scores well on an AP exam but isn’t what many professors are looking for. It can cut into the time teachers would otherwise spend on different forms of reading and writing. And the ubiquity of college-level work in high school has blurred the boundaries between them. That can leave students with a diminished experience of both.

Observers largely agree that doing college-level work in high school, however rigorous, isn’t the same as being a college student. “AP is college — I mean, you get college credit for it,” Vecera says. “But I think we have to ask ourselves: What is it that we’re giving the credit for?”

Answering that question begins, Vecera says, with recognizing what differentiates high-school courses — even when they cover college material — from college ones.

The question could be answered with a simple shorthand, something like: In high school, students acquire knowledge; in college, they start to create it. But both levels of education are vast and varied.

Advanced Placement courses do approximate the content covered in an introductory college course, Vecera says. But college courses deliver more than that content. They also introduce students to disciplinary ways of thinking, which helps to foster the critical-thinking skills that many professors see as the core benefit of a college education.

It’s this part of their college coursework that many students don’t seem to expect or understand. After all, their high-school teachers have expertise in both the content and how to teach it, but they are generally not active scholars with terminal degrees in a discipline. Students certainly hear that college will be different from high school. But how many of them are really told how it will be different?

To earn AP credit, students must perform well on an exam that tests their content knowledge. The exams involve writing essays, but the way they’re scored is quite different from how many professors will evaluate students’ writing. Students, then, might understand the content, score well on the exam, and still be unprepared for the ways that knowledge will be applied and assessed in college.

Besides, the very notion that college work should be done in high school so that college can be knocked out more quickly encourages students to focus on their performance over their learning and discourages them from leaving their comfort zones, Vecera says. It feeds into the idea that college is an exercise in fulfilling requirements efficiently while taking minimal risks.

Early-college work is supposed to challenge strong students, make college feel achievable, and put a dent in its price tag. But even if all of that is achieved, it comes with trade-offs. Might the well-intended spread of early-college courses make it harder for students to understand and experience what’s distinctive about college work? Could the early courses students take to boost their admissions chances and cut their time to degree wind up cheapening their experience of college?

Many high-school students feel significant pressure to get into a good college, however defined. But being a strong college applicant and a well-prepared college student are two different goals.

Research shows that exposure to college work during high school is associated with higher rates of college-going, perhaps because it allows students to see themselves as college material. But it’s not clear that doing more early-college work increases the benefit.

For students, though, doing more is compelling. Some, of course, have maxed out what their high school has to offer academically. But whether or not that’s the case, advanced work burnishes a college application. As it becomes more common, not participating feels like putting oneself at a disadvantage. There’s also the undeniable practical benefit: Earning college credit in high school and shortening the time to degree makes higher education a lot more affordable, an urgent issue for the majority of students.

But it risks truncating students’ transition into college, and rushing their plans for what they’ll do next.

Tobias Wilson-Bates grew up with a mother who taught in middle school and a father who taught in college. He’s been interested in how different levels of education fit together for as long as he can remember.

Wilson-Bates, an associate professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College, now thinks that students should not receive college credit for high-school work (indeed, some colleges have stopped or curtailed the practice). Awarding college credit for work completed in high school, he thinks, elides the differences between two distinct learning environments and leaves students with a weaker version of each.

It isn’t a matter of rigor. High-school courses, Wilson-Bates says, can be every bit as difficult as college ones. They are simply two different projects.

High school is designed to deliver students a curriculum, what adults in a state or school district have decided graduates need to know. This typically entails taking courses in certain subjects sequentially for a set number of years.

In high school, he says, knowledge acquired by others is passed on to the next generation. And students have to go to high school to a certain age; it is designed “to ensure that your child is in place and protected and supplied.”

College, though, isn’t a curriculum. Sure, there might be general-education requirements — which college-level credit earned during high school often allows students to place out of — but they can often be satisfied in a host of different ways. Content plays a smaller role in college than in high school; there’s less sense that every college graduate needs to know the same thing, and knowledge that’s deemed essential is moving more quickly, too. College courses show students that much of what they’ve learned before is more complicated than they’d previously understood. And going is voluntary.

High-school teachers also play a fundamentally different role for students than do professors, says John Downes-Angus, an English teacher at Baruch High School, a public school that has a relationship with Baruch College in the City University of New York system.

Teachers, unlike most professors, see their students five days a week. And they’re expected to provide more “scaffolding and feedback,” he says. A high-school teacher wants students to feel “supported,” Downes-Angus says, “like they have a good, clear sense of what they are expected to do. But sometimes that desire becomes the main goal instead of letting them make mistakes.”

Downes-Angus, who alternates teaching AP English Language and AP English Literature, among other courses, says he’s lucky to work at a school where students’ performance on the exams isn’t overemphasized. When performance is the goal, he says, students are taught to focus on reading and writing short passages like those on the exam, which can box out building other skills — like reading full books — that a professor will expect students to have already developed before they take an introductory literature course.

Dual enrollment — the other major avenue of early-college work — sidesteps some of the issues faced in AP, like the focus on the AP exam. Even so, the value of taking college courses this way has generally been more assumed than carefully mapped out.

That’s what Melinda Karp, founder of Phase Two Advisory, which works with colleges to improve student success, argued in her 2005 dissertation on dual enrollment, which she called “a policy without a theory.” At the time, Karp says, dual enrollment and AP were seen as avenues for boosting college access and completion and for making them more equitable. But that has always been complicated by the fact that students must be deemed college-ready to do those programs in the first place.

At the same time, she says, recent research on community colleges has made it more apparent that college readiness is multifaceted. “Being college-ready is not just, Can you do calculus and English?” Karp says. Rather, it involves a host of skills, including metacognitive ones that allow students to successfully complete their work. A student might be college-ready in some ways and not others, or ready for some required courses but not others.

The power of dual enrollment, Karp says, is that it allows students to practice those skills so that they can draw on them in college. But does an AP or dual-enrollment course taught by a teacher at a high school provide that practice?

Even if students have taken courses taught by college professors alongside college students, that’s still different from being full-time college students themselves. Consider: When students get to college, their coursework is no longer necessarily sequential, says Ethan Hutt, an associate professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And they are introduced to entire new disciplines, sometimes several at a time. It’s largely on students to sort out how their courses fit together.

That’s not the only sense in which the working conditions of college are harder than what students experience in AP during high school.

When students perform well on an AP exam, they’ve had the whole year to study for it, points out Kevin Yee, director of the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Central Florida. Their college exams happen on a much quicker time frame, with a lot less infrastructure to help them prepare.

At the same time, Yee says, students are pushing so hard to get ahead in high school that some of them burn out near the end. Then they’re expected to perform at yet a higher level.

Students’ transition to college has long been bumpy.

Pooja K. Agarwal, for one, isn’t convinced there’s been a drastic shift in students’ adjustment. A lot of the problems simply come down to how students study, says Agarwal, an associate professor of psychology at the Berklee College of Music whose research investigates how high-school and college students learn.

By and large, students in both high school and college cram. They reread, they highlight, they take notes. That works well when the goal is short-term performance on high-stakes exams, Agarwal says. But it’s not an effective way to learn for the long haul.

When professors get frustrated that students don’t know material that has been covered before, the issue might not be that no one taught them the material. It might be that no one taught them how to study it effectively.

And if students are showing up in college classrooms with ineffective study practices, she notes, professors can help them create better ones.

Research-based strategies, which students can do on their own, allow them to learn better without necessarily spending extra time. These strategies can both help students perform well on their next test and remember the material for years to come.

The strategies Agarwal researches utilize retrieval practice, meaning that students have to pull information out of their memories. So instead of reading while taking notes, Agarwal encourages students to read, close the book, and then write down notes. When running through flashcards, students should pause to say or write the answer before checking it, and they should mix them up and practice each card three times, even if they got it right the first time.

The research behind such practices, Agarwal says, has been around for 100 years in some cases. But she’s part of a more recent science-communication push to get it in front of teachers and students, one that’s starting to pay off.

“I don’t see us revamping the incentive structure in high school or college,” Agarwal says. Students have lots of reasons to focus on their performance. “But we can change how students learn how to study. They’re still going to cram for the short term, but there are ways they can study to improve their short-term learning and their long-term learning.”

The potential benefits of knocking out requirements before getting to college are pretty clear. But what might students miss out on if they skip over those courses? Consider the example of language instruction.

In the 13 years that Lini Ge Polin has taught Chinese language courses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she has been pleased to see students come in with solid and improving preparation from K-12 Chinese courses.

While Chapel Hill has global languages as part of its general-education requirements, students can test out via the university’s placement-exam process or by coming in with appropriate AP or IB credentials, though they are not awarded credit for doing so.

It’s a reasonable system, Polin thinks. Still, she says, there’s something powerful and distinctive about studying a second language in college.

No matter how proficient students are in a second language, they can always improve. They can always learn more about a different culture. But improved language ability isn’t the only, or maybe even the most important, reason to take such courses at the college level.

In broad strokes, language instruction is different in college than in K-12, Polin says, because professors do the bulk of their teaching in their target language. That, she says, is an expectation that is appropriate in college but generally not before it. Even for college-level students, this approach is quite demanding, and that challenge can help students be courageous, vulnerable, and resilient, she says.

That’s even more true for students who take their language study to the next level, studying abroad and taking intensive language courses in a country where it’s spoken. Some pledge to only use the language they’re learning during that time. These students, Polin says, see a rapid improvement in their language ability that’s hard to achieve any other way. That, in turn, builds up their confidence and sets them up for professional success.

This kind of study-abroad experience also builds up students’ “tolerance for ambiguity,” she says.

Few students are likely to think about building up their tolerance for ambiguity when they apply to college. But plenty of graduates would nod along with the idea that this is an important outcome. Perhaps that’s the heart of the problem: Many of the things students do to look good to the admissions office are different from the things that professors want to see in the classroom, and some are even at cross-purposes.

But it’s hard for students to know that until they actually get to college. By then, they’re on a path and in a hurry. Changing direction, rethinking why they’re there, and focusing on the process of learning and the virtues of intellectual risk is costly — if it even crosses their minds.