Other Information

Indiana’s colleges and universities provide a variety of classes and special programs to help high-school students prepare to be successful in college, even to get some college credits while you’re still in high school. If you live near a college, you may already be aware of classes you can take at the campus during or after school—or of concurrent classes offered in your own building. If you don’t happen to live near a college, though, you may think you’re out of luck.

Wrong! Many public and private colleges make these classes available via technology so you can enroll wherever you live. That opens a world of subject choices and helps everyone. After all, even the best high school can temporarily lose a key teacher, and there just aren’t enough teachers in some subjects to go around.

So why should you care? Isn’t life simpler if you just slide through school taking the easiest classes possible to keep up your grade-point average? Actually, no. For one thing, college admissions officers look at more than grade-point averages and SAT scores in making their decisions, so a high GPA, while important, won’t guarantee admission. Keep reading!

It’s become a cliché to point out that most well-paying jobs today require some form of postsecondary education. That may not mean a bachelor’s degree: it could be a community-college associate degree (because you just may decide later you want to keep going) or a formal apprenticeship program or technical certification of some kind.

Many lengthy research studies have documented that the single most significant predictor of college success (whether you define that as getting admitted, staying after your freshman year, or completing the degree in two or four years) is having taken challenging classes in high school. And these improved outcomes apply even more strongly to those whose parents didn’t go to college, those categorized as racial or ethnic minorities, those from low-income families, or those who are just late bloomers and haven’t done well in formal schooling.

So browse through the information at the left and you’re likely to find something that sounds appealing. Some high schools are already making classes available via technology, so you may have some familiarity with terminology already. More schools aren’t, so we explain the differences in format and delivery mode as well as offer some things to think about in terms of your own preferences and study habits.

Our advice is general, but since there’s really no such thing as an “average” person, it’s also important, once you think you might be interested, to talk about this with your school counselor and your parent or guardian. They can give you much more specific advice based on your own background and personality. But do consider the possibilities. If nothing else, most colleges are using technology in their campus-based classes much more extensively than are most high schools at this point, and you can count on needing to know how to learn successfully in this way (it’s more than knowing how to Google or use IM). And more and more employers are using technology in their training programs, so your future success in on-the-job training may also benefit from some early practice. Taking a class or two while still in high-school can give you a head start in many ways to a lifetime of successful learning.