When Should I Go to College?
College for Christians - Chapter 2
Part One of my college guide for students and families wraps up with a second big question to ask before applying to colleges. Last week: why? This week: when?
You shouldn’t go to college without first asking yourself if you’re ready to make so significant a commitment and why it matters that much to you. Don’t just let custom or expectation carry you into an experience as challenging and expensive as college.
Unfortunately, that’s actually a mental model itself, the one from The Real World of College that I didn’t summarize in the previous chapter. In their national study, Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner found that a few of the college students they interviewed best fit an inertial model: “After high school, one goes to college, but does not think much about reasons for being there, or of taking advantage of various opportunities; nor does one exhibit noteworthy aspirations.” One such student called college “just kind of like, the next step. And it wasn’t such a bad next step, but, but it was just kind of like, ‘Oh, what do you do after high school? You go to college.”1
Only 3% of the students they interviewed frame college in that way, making the inertial group by far the smallest in the study. And its size shrinks as people spend more time in college and develop other ways of interpreting their experience. Only 1% of recent graduates fit the inertial model, and virtually none of the adults in the study do.
Still, my guess is that inertia plays at least some role in carrying many teenagers into college. Even if they have some sense of college as a place to explore options, to complete a transaction that leads to employment, or to experience personal transformation, college can still feel “like, the next step” after high school. So before we get to questions about how to pick a college, let me pose one more big question: When should I go to college?
We’ll get to the good reasons that high school most often leads directly into college, but it doesn’t have to be that way. As we’ll see later in this chapter, more and more students start college while they’re still in high school, or they take a break between those two stages in their education.
Or maybe the answer to the When? question is “Never.”
Option #1: Don’t Go to College
According to the U.S. Department of Education, most college-aged Americans aren’t in college at all: almost 62% of 18-24 year olds. Some of them never get to college, or spend only a brief time there. The Census Bureau estimates that only 37% of Americans aged 25 or older have completed a bachelor’s degree — about the same share that got no farther than high school. Around 10% finish their educational career with a two-year associate’s degree, usually at a community college, while 15% attend college at least briefly but complete no degree.
Some want to go to college but decide it’s too expensive or too difficult. Some start, struggle, and leave, maybe finishing their degree later in life. But millions of younger Americans simply decide that they don’t need to go to college at all. In fact, their numbers are growing, as more families question the value of college and more political and business leaders emphasize jobs that don’t require a college degree.
If you found the exploratory or transformational mental models in ch. 1 at all compelling, you can probably stop reading this section and skip ahead to Option #2 — or head straight to the second part of the book. You already sense that college will be a key stage in your personal development, one that you’d rather invest in than skip altogether.
But if you did resonate with the transactional model — treating college as a means to a professional end— then make sure that the career you’re contemplating actually requires a bachelor’s degree (or higher) before you agree to a transaction as costly as four (or more) years of higher education.
A great tool here is O*Net, a database from the U.S. Department of Labor. You can learn more about any occupation that interests you: how much it pays and how many openings it’s projected to have in the coming years, but also what skills it requires and how much education is required to hone those skills. Of O*Net’s five “job zones,” only the last two require a bachelor’s degree or higher. Many occupations still require nothing more than a high school diploma (if that), and even some highly-skilled, high-paying jobs start with a 1-2 year certificate program or an on-the-job apprenticeship. In fact, there’s such a shortage of the latter category of workers that the Labor Department now hosts a website dedicated to placing Americans on those career paths.
It’s not just blue-collar jobs. Governments in states as red as Florida and as blue as Minnesota have started to drop bachelor’s degree requirements from public sector positions that may not require that level of education. Online providers like Amazon Web Services, Coursera, and LinkedIn now offer microcredentials like certifications and badges, which can demonstrate to employers that job candidates have a particular skill that maybe didn’t have to be bundled with others in a four-year degree program.
But keep in mind that other professions are moving in the opposite direction: requiring more higher education, not less.
My mom never went to college because becoming a registered nurse in the 1970s only required a training program in a hospital, not a four-year degree with a broad liberal arts base. But over the past fifty years, almost all those hospital-based programs have closed or been absorbed into universities like Bethel, as it became harder and harder to become an R.N. without a B.S.N.
For that matter, more and more professional occupations now expect more than four years of higher education. Not just doctors, dentists, lawyers, professors, and pastors, but teachers, engineers, social workers, and occupational therapists increasingly have to plan for graduate school. Or, like my nephew who wants to be an architect, some students head straight from high school into a “3:2” university program that combines undergraduate and graduate education into a five-year track that ends with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
Option #2: The Gap Year
In 2016 there was no American high school graduate more famous than Malia Obama, the elder daughter of the sitting U.S. president. But while she was accepted to Harvard, Obama deferred starting college until 2017. Instead of taking freshman courses, she spent two months living in Bolivia and Peru, then completed an internship with a movie production company. In the process, the 44th president’s daughter significantly boosted interest in an idea that had been around since the 1980s: the “gap year.”
According to the Gap Year Association (GYA), upwards of 60,000 American students take a semester or year off before starting college, a number that more than doubled when COVID-19 sent many colleges online in 2020-2021. Even if the gap year retains anything like its pandemic popularity, only 1-2% of high school graduates will elect that option. Nevertheless, it’s a unique opportunity that can offer more than good memories, with some research suggesting that it can lead to better college performance and greater job satisfaction.
There’s no single way to spend the gap year. The GYA accredits several programs, most of which offer experiential education and cross-cultural immersion through travel to other parts of the world. But other gap year programs feature environmental education, leadership training, and pre-college preparation for students with disabilities. One of my best students worked on a political campaign before starting at Bethel. Some Christian organizations offer gap years focused on faith formation and missions work, including Youth With A Mission, OneLife Institute, and the Holy Family Mission, a Catholic program in Ireland.
Why take a gap year? GYA says that most of the students it works with either feel burned out from high school or want to know themselves better before starting college. In that sense, a gap year can serve as a pre-college version of the exploratory model I discussed in ch. 1. Indeed, if reading that chapter left you feeling like you weren’t really sure why you wanted to go to college, a gap year might provide the change in perspective you need to see higher education more clearly. “I didn’t have the focus or exposure to seek out what I wanted to do” in college, one student told Karl Haigler and Rae Nelson, authors of The Gap-Year Advantage. “If you have any doubt that you will succeed, take time off to ensure you will succeed.” To Haigler and Nelson, the gap year helps meet the needs of “students and their parents who may wish they had focused as much on having success in college as they had on gaining access to college.”2
But even gap year advocates admit the challenges and pitfalls of deferring higher education. First, something like 10% of students who take that year off never do start college. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; again, not everyone wants or needs to go to college. But taking that break does risk losing the momentum that helps carry many students from their last year of high school into their first year of college. While there are significant differences between high school and college learning (more on this in ch. 16), high school can foster habits and cultivate skills that will serve you well in college, habits and skills that can easily atrophy if you don’t keep using them.
Second, gap year programs can be quite expensive. Even if you don’t want to spend the $18,500 (plus airfare) that it now costs to reprise Malia Obama’s three-month program in South America, many gap years will add to the already high cost of post-high school education. Indeed, many students take that time off not for the purposes of education, travel, service, or spiritual growth, but to earn money for college.
So if college affordability is a major concern for your family but you still want a unique educational challenge, consider a third alternative to the traditional high school-to-college pathway.
Option #3: Early College
Because I had skipped 2nd grade, I was just seventeen years old when I arrived at the College of William and Mary. I walked into my freshman dorm fully expecting to be the youngest person there… only to realize that the two guys sharing the room across the hall were only sixteen, bright young students whose parents had taken advantage of a special program in Virginia to start their college studies early.
Little did I know that my home state offered a similar alternative. In 1985 the Minnesota state legislature created the Postsecondary Enrollment Option (PSEO), which still pays for 12th, 11th, and even some 10th graders to take college courses that count towards both high school and college graduation.3 College courses, that is, being taught at colleges by college professors. Later, Minnesota added the College in the Schools program (CIS), which offers high school and college credit for courses taught by high school teachers with advanced training. Other states have done likewise in recent years, causing enrollment in college courses among students younger than 18 to increase over 11% from spring 2021 to spring 2023.
By offering what’s called “dual” or “concurrent enrollment” in high school and college, both PSEO and CIS differ from the Advanced Placement courses that I took — or International Baccalaureate (IB) classes that fewer high schools offer. Those AP classes ultimately helped me earn college credit in calculus, French, and U.S. history because I earned high scores on AP exams, but they were taught in my high school by my high school teachers. My college accepted those credits-by-examination as fulfilling some general education requirements, but I didn’t really experience the differences between high school and college learning until I got to William and Mary.
What all such “early college” options have in common — whether dual enrollment courses like PSEO and CIS or high school-based programs like AP and IB — is that they offer students and families two big advantages. Most obviously, they help save money. I was able to finish college early because I transferred in a semester’s worth of AP credits. Minnesota’s PSEO option lets students receive a year or two of college credits for free, with the state’s taxpayers picking up the tab. At a time when most American colleges and universities are struggling to maintain their numbers, adding early college students can help balance their budgets — and perhaps recruit full-time students, if those high schoolers like their experience and want to stay on that campus to complete their degrees. So more and more colleges are opening their doors to those younger students: part- and full-time, residential and commuter, and even online.
Early college is here to stay, and well worth your attention. But it’s also worth noting that dual enrollment programs were originally meant for another purpose: to provide an advanced educational option to gifted and talented students who found their high school too easy or not responsive to their particular needs and interests. To my mind, that’s still the best reason to try an early college option. Some 16- and 17-year olds have the intellectual abilities and emotional maturity to take on academic challenges and opportunities that most high schools simply can’t provide.4
Indeed, it used to be common to start college earlier in adolescence, and some colleges have revived that option. Since the late 1970s, for example, Bard College has run a program called Simon’s Rock, which admits 16-year olds to a two-year sequence of early college courses. On such “Rocker,” Columbia University linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter, recalled that the “idea is to respect the minds of young people, rather than assume that they are for some reason unburnished until the magic age of 18.”
Option #4: Graduate High School, then Go to College
He’s right: there’s nothing magic about the age of 18. Some people are ready for college at eighteen, some years earlier or later (or never).
The key is to be honest with yourself about what you’re prepared to take on. For if it’s a mistake to assume that almost no 16- or 17-year old can thrive in college, it’s a bigger mistake to assume that almost anyone that age can. If in doubt, I think there are two good reasons to stick with the traditional path of going to college around age 18, right after graduating high school.
First, four years of high school has proven to be highly important to the intellectual, emotional, and social development of most young adolescents, at least since it became commonplace in the 20th century. I’m a college professor, and my kids only just started 9th grade. But between advising dozens of future high school teachers and serving on the board of a private preK-12 school, I do have a clear sense of the benefits that accrue from spending ages 15-18 in a school where well-trained educators not only provide a solid, broad-based academic foundation for later study, but social and emotional learning. Not to mention opportunities to grow through participation in sports, theater, music, forensics, journalism, student government, community service, and other activities.
I believe in the transformative power of higher education and know how distinct its teaching and learning is from what happens in high school. But I also know that the former usually can’t happen without the latter.
Second, as much as high school walks most teenagers through adolescence, college marks a key transition from that stage into adulthood. As we’ll discuss more later, college is often where young adults first experience the freedom and pressure of taking full responsibility for their actions and beliefs. I’m no expert in developmental psychology, but my experience has been that it’s not until age 18 that most American teenagers are ready to explore identity, exercise agency, and develop autonomy within the reduced structure of undergraduate education — and it’s when they’re more likely to possess the emotional maturity to weather the academic, relational, spiritual, and other struggles that are typical of the first year or two of college.
So if you’re a high school student, ask yourself some tough questions. Do you welcome new challenges? Are you ready to take on more responsibility for your own learning, to work unguided without direct supervision? (For example, if you didn’t recognize some of the words I used in the previous paragraph, did you take it on yourself to look them up, then reread the paragraph?) Are you prepared to fail at something that once came easily and to try again? Can you receive criticism without growing defensive, or consider an idea radically different from your own without dismissing it out of hand?
Most importantly, can you do all of that without parental intervention? If not, then early college may not be for you.
Read next: “Choosing a College.”
Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner, The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be (MIT Press, 2022), pp. 121, 123.
Karl Haigler and Rae Nelson, The Gap-Year Advantage: Helping Your Child Benefit from Time Off Before or During College (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005), pp. 3, 10.
If your state does offer a dual/concurrent enrollment option, double-check which colleges participate in the program. In some places, it may be limited to two-year schools, or only state-supported institutions.
Incidentally, that’s my advice for AP and IB courses as well. I think 9th grade is too early to be seeking college credit, but I’m glad that our kids’ AP Human Geography course has challenged them to think more deeply about their city, state, country, and world — and pushed them to develop good study habits early in their time at high school.
But too many high school students just sign up for any AP class they can find, out of the mistaken assumption that any such credits will magically save money in college. That’s a good way to waste transfer credit, since most college curricula are designed carefully to meet specific objectives. If you do want to use AP to get college credit, do your research: find out which (if any) requirements those courses can meet at colleges you’re considering, and check to see what score you need to get on the AP exam to earn credit (usually at least a 3 out of 5).