How Does a College Preparatory Programme Help you Develop?

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Do you have any preference over selecting your college after your high school education? Of course, you have. Actually not just you, but most of the students have some favourite institutions for their higher education life. But, the tragedy is all of you cannot make your way to your favourite colleges, which leaves you with utter disappointments. Well, for students like you Khan Academy has started a college preparatory programme, which aims at grooming newly passed-out high school students for the admission tests conducted by their favourite colleges. And, guess what? This online learning programme is absolutely for free for all.

Khan Academy is widely known for offering free education online that anyone can access from anywhere in the world. Besides being absolutely free, all the courses offered by Khan Academy come with the usual benefits of online learning, where learners can learn at their own pace, enjoying a full-fledged audio-visual learning experience – video tutorials, online discussions, live student-teacher interactions via video conferencing etc.

Concept of Preparatory Programmes

But, whilst this sort of online classes has its enormous accessibility to people, there are numerous limitations as well with the free programmes. Yet, the concept of offering preparatory programmes to higher educational institutions like colleges and universities is really great. Many eminent boarding schools are providing excellent college preparatory programmes not only on academic enhancements, but also on all-round personality developments.

When you target for an eminent college, you should not only be academically strong, but also personality-wise attractive. At the best institutes for college preparatory programmes you will get to improve your character education, athletics, performing arts and community service apart from academic grooming.

Qualities that Develop in Good Programmes

Whilst screening students, prestigious colleges consider many qualities to judge the candidates. They see how rationally curiosity, integrity courage and leadership are mingled and developed in a candidate. And, without an all-round development programme such perfection cannot be achieved.

Curiosity

Through numerous research-oriented studies candidates at these institutes nurture their students to nourish their curious beings. The more curious one is for knowledge, the nearer he/she reaches to the success.

Integrity

To develop sense of integrity, prestigious college preparatory schools make their students undergo extensive theoretical as well as applied sides of a curriculum, thereby extracting the essential integrity of any subject.

Leadership & Courage

Courage and leadership have always been praised as the noble qualities. To grow and further enhance these virtues, a number of project-based learning programmes are initiated to extract real personality of a candidate. Sports and athletics help a lot to develop such faculty among students.

College preparatory programmes are the training to a broader educational life, wherefrom real direction of life is perceived, in true sense of term. Attending a good preparatory programme, one advances himself/herself to the successful life ahead.

High Schools must Necessarily Equip Students for College Education

What’s the biggest problem with the majority of schools today is that they focus upon completing their curriculum in such a rush that their intention to prepare students for college completely gets ignored. Rather, experts believe that this should be the primary focus of all high schools today where students must be provided such courses that would let them achieve practical skills and proceed with confidence to colleges.

So, what should the High School Curricula focus upon? 

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For every high school, its key concern should relate to not only the experiential but also the academic angles of education. To be precise, students here must know how to create a budget so that they can keep track of their own expenses and proceed accordingly. In this respect, the Financial Educators Council has researched and found out:

• 1/3rd of the college students have confessed that they are not well equipped with the process of money management 
• Students found to be graduating from high schools in states require personal finance education that actually makes them more successful 
• They possess a higher saving rate than the high school graduates in states where financial education is not compulsory.

So, unless students would be given financial education, they would not be able to create a budget and would therefore end up spending more money than required. Therefore, the high schools should rather stop concentrating too much on art and music classes, especially for students who would be graduating. Rather, classes that would help them to lead better lives in the long-run must be provided in good numbers.

Apart from creating a budget, students while pursuing financial education must know:

1. How to file taxes 
2. How to deal with car insurance 
3. How to deal with interest rates 

Well, this does not mean that the other efforts put by high schools shouldn’t be ignored. Whatever necessary academic skills are required, high schools must ensure to strengthen these to no end. However, financial education would carry equal importance for one’s career to remain stable and balanced.

As per the Washington Times: 

• 3 out of 4 graduates are not prepared for college 
• One remedial class is essential for this affected population 
• ACT preparation will assist students in high schools 

 So, how the test would be conducted?

There will be four sections for the test: 

1. Reading 
2. English 
3. Math 
4. Science 
5. A writing section, which is optional

Now, if high schools keep taking these tests on a regular basis, students would be aware of their progress levels. Moreover, schools will be required to ensure that students are having those tools that would let them score high through ACT. Hence, they would be prepared to sit for the basic college courses. Moreover, the high school students would be saving ample time and money and would not be required to take remedial classes at their respective colleges.

Today, the concept of learning online has also been introduced by many schools with the intention to let students obtain education within their means. Even reputed universities have started offering online courses in numerous subjects. Therefore, if courses related to financial education can be introduced through digital learning in high schools, students there would not take too much time to prepare themselves for college education. This would indeed be considered a big initiative.