Many high school students are “college ready” by the end of 11th grade, and a new report argues for letting them finish high school and start college full time.
The study, by Education Reform Now and the Alliance for Excellent Education, calculates 850,000 students are ready for college work. That’s the number of students who meet all four “college-ready” benchmark scores on the ACT. Of those students, nearly 1 in 3 comes from low-income families.
Enabling those students to skip a fourth year of high school would provide important opportunities that would be unnecessarily delayed if school systems stick only to the traditional seat-time model of high school completion, the report concludes.
