I can understand why AP would be more appealing than dual-enrollment to some people because of the GPA breaks, but my high school is rather stupid. They don’t weigh GPA’s for hard classes at all, and the AP classes are overcrowded, hard to get into, and usually poorly taught, so for me dual-enrollment sounded like a much better option.

Even though I’ve loved the freedom of my new schedule, there have been a few drawbacks. Firstly, my GPA has dropped a bit since enrolling in PSEO. Math is not really my strong suit, and I got a B in College Algebra, ruining my 4.0 and knocking me out of the top 5% of the class. That’s right, if you take only easy classes, it is very easy to get a 4.0 around my high school, and it screws all of the students who want to challenge themselves over.

Another weakness is that my credits won’t transfer everywhere. I wish there were some sort of comprehensive list of all of the places that will accept credit, but for the most part colleges are not very forthcoming on their websites about accepting other credits. Most “elite” schools will accept little, if any, of my credits, but all of the colleges in my state (Minnesota) are willing to accept them all.

In short, PSEO has been a wonderful experience for me and has been way less stressful than regular high school, with it’s controlling administration and teenage drama. However, the challenging coursework has caused my GPA to drop, and I am now very limited in the schools that I can attend without losing credit. It’s a good thing that I like the University of Minnesota — Twin Cities, or I’d have really been screwed over!

Your community college credits are transferable, by law, to another state-funded institution of higher education in the state of California. Florida is under no obligation to accept those credits. Thus since you have not yet graduated high school, you will be considered a freshman in Florida. However, in California, you can be a junior (as long as all of your credits fall within the California state guidelines for transfer–you’ll have to talk to the colleges there to be sure).

If you want to go to college in Florida, then your dual enrollment classes will certainly help you get admitted. But again, they credits will not likely transfer. So you have to decide which is preferable: save money and time and stay in California, or move to Florida and pay more money and take longer to complete your degree (and then maybe go to Florida for graduate school…?)

Hope this helps.

As for your fear that private and public colleges will not take due notice of your son or daughter’s transcript, please don’t worry. Try not to, anyway. Colleges have their own internal systems of judging the rigor of a student’s curriculum. They will look not only at PSEO courses, but also AP, IB, and honors. They will also receive a profile of the graduates of the school, which will explain their weighting policies (or lack thereof). When it comes to merit based aid, it’s usually based on GPA and test scores (see Southwestern University, for example, which makes their awards very clear). Or else it is some mysterious, unidentified process that colleges prefer to keep to themselves. If there is any doubt, you can contact individual colleges and universities directly to learn about their policies about merit aid awards and their relation to weighted and unweighted GPA and class rank.

I hope this helps a bit.