The Duggars and CollegePlus

[Jonathan Whatley]

[On the question of whether the first two years in college is usually a review of high school:]
Generally speaking yes... personally speaking absolutely. Everything in my first section for my degree, I knew a large amount of it even before finishing HS. The exception probably being, some more advanced/complex economic issues for Macro and Micro, and Managerial Communications. Everything else, English, W Civ I & II, College Math, Algebra, Precalc, Stats, Biology, American Gov, History of US I & II, SS&H, A&I Lit, and Intro to World Religions. I'm not saying I didn't need to study for those, but I had a great foundation and needed more of a brush up cause 75-90% of the info I already learned. BTW, I even specifically said, there are exceptions […] and the medical field is one.

We certainly agree that there's an overlap here: Some strong students will graduate from high school at or close to the outcome levels of some associate's degrees in liberal studies.

You make a strongly stated case that there's a very large overlap between the first two years of college in general and high school in general. We've put aside health and pre-health as an exception where the first two years of college add much value. I think we could also put aside reasonably solid programs in any individual STEM field. If your college physics department is really putting students into the third year who as a whole perform only marginally better than representative high school graduates, I think you have an exceptionally weak physics department.

I think we could put aside most programs highly focused in skilled professions. I understand there are great high school programs in auto mechanics, culinary arts, HVAC and refrigeration, etc. Yet, I think a solid graduate of a solid two-year associate's in these and other career fields will generally have much stronger knowledge and skill in their field.

Say a student has studied the Bible and Christian belief from early childhood to high school. If the general rules proposed apply here, wouldn't we tell them they have little to gain from 100- and 200-level college courses in Bible and Christian theology, and that 300- and 400-level courses, they'll "never use?"

If not, we should probably start excepting studies in Christianity. The same should apply to studies in Judaism – there seems to be population of Jewish students, by the way, who bring their religious educations to the Big Three; Excelsior and Charter Oak have Judaic Studies programs and/or capstones – and in other religions with rich traditions that, considered neutrally as academic content areas, people can do a whole lot with.

Then, I think it's self-evident that smart students given smart faculty and two years can similarly do a whole lot to explore many other bodies of knowledge and skill – including languages, literatures, other expressive arts, and social sciences – to much greater breadths and depths than they would have reached in high school.

I think you're drawing conclusions about the first two years of college in general based on about 60 semester hours of survey courses, widely distributed and mostly matching subjects from high school courses, that you tested out of.

This was a great strategy to get you where you want to go. I think you're an outstanding example of a star student of the Big Three.

Still, I think that not all, but very many people go into much greater depth in at least one field, probably their major, in the first two years of college than they came close to in high school.

And then there's waving off the second two years in many fields as material most will "never use." Again, respectfully, I have to disagree.