Special thank you to Whitney in North Carolina for sharing her daughter’s HS4CC story! She finished 2 years of college in high school using dual enrollment and is off to the University of Alabama with a full ride scholarship! This mom actually slowed her daughter down a bit. You’re going to love this story!
HS4CC mom Whitney writes:
“Now that my daughter has officially wrapped up her senior year, I thought I’d share our HS4CC story…
Charlotte started earning college credit at 15, and she has over 50 college credit hours from a combination of CLEP, AP, and dual enrollment. She was the very first 9th grader to enroll in the Career & College Promise at Davidson-Davie Community College (North Carolina dual enrollment program); thankfully we had the blessing of a very capable CCP Coordinator, because we all learned a lot together that first year!
We intentionally made the decision not to pursue as many college credits as we could have for a couple of reasons. It was important to us that we implement a very specific style of education in our high school, including an intense focus on Charlotte’s interests and certain educational philosophies and methods meaningful to our family. We also knew based on her early test performance that Charlotte was likely to qualify for high test-based scholarship awards, but we still felt it prudent to hedge against disappointment by earning a solid number of free and low-cost credits in order to offset costs as necessary.
Our gamble — and most of all, Charlotte’s hard work! — paid off. She was named a National Merit Finalist and is matriculating at the University of Alabama with a full-ride scholarship that includes not only room, board, and tuition, but also special stipends for studying abroad and/or research. She will transfer approximately 47 credit hours and has met some requirements in her major as well as all of her general education requirements. Her scholarship and those credits will leave her free to explore classes that interest her or simply have more time for research, internships, and fun. She has been accepted to the Honors College and the Blount Scholars program and I know that her dual enrollment experience helped to make her competitive for those opportunities. She will study computer science, with an eye toward a career in software engineering or data analysis/AI.
There were so many advantages to HS4CC, not the least of which were her access to coursework we weren’t able to provide easily at home, including advanced maths and experience in a real science lab. The beauty of it is that each family is able to make it work for them. If you want to pursue an associate’s degree or even a bachelor’s while in high school, you can! But you don’t have to. You can customize your child’s HS4CC experience just as you do everything else in your homeschool and feel confident that every credit your child earns is a step in the right direction. I’m so grateful to this community and to Jennifer Cook DeRosa for helping to make this journey possible.”
Photo credit: @timewinkphotography
