One thought I had is that he could take an extra 1 or 2 classes each year online through an accredited online high school program to meet these requirements. However, our high school wouldn’t accept these classes for credit, so they wouldn’t appear on his official transcript. We’d need to send in separate transcripts showing those courses.
Do you know if colleges would accept these courses to meet the requirements? If it makes a difference, he’s probably looking at either less competitive state schools, or smaller less well known liberal arts colleges.
As the parent of a teenager myself, “The Dean” is a big fan of teaching kids real-world skills and I applaud your decision to expose your son to a vocational program. The lack of senior math at school will probably not hurt him at college-admission time (assuming that he has had at least three years of high school math through Algebra 2 or, better yet, pre-calculus) but the lack of two years of the same foreign language could be detrimental, if the colleges don’t accept your son’s online credits.
You’ll probably find that the private colleges on his list will be more flexible than the public ones. That is, if your son can submit transcripts from an online high school proving that he has taken math and, especially, foreign language, the private-college admission folks won’t be picky about where he took these classes, even if these classes don’t show up in his own high school’s records. The public colleges, on the other hand, can get mired in government red tape, and it may be a harder sell to get your son’s online foreign-language credits approved.
So I recommend that you contact admission officials now at the public colleges to which your son is likely to apply. Call each admission office and ask for the name and email address of the staff member who oversees applicants from your son’s high school, if you can’t find this information on the college’s Web site. Send an email message to this regional rep asking if your son’s online credits will make him eligible for admission, even if they aren’t on his official transcript. Be sure to include a list of all of the classes that your son has taken already and is likely to take by the time he graduates, being careful to differentiate between those classes he’ll take at his high school and those that he’ll take online. Also be sure to save the response you receive in case you need it for “ammunition” down the road.
If you want, you can be pro-active and also contact an admission rep or two at the private colleges that your son may be considering. It certainly won’t hurt … not only to get some helpful feedback on your plan but also to get your son on the admissions-office radar screen and show early interest in the school.
It’s possible, of course, that if your son’s passion for his vocational program takes off, he may decide to postpone college … or skip it altogether. So perhaps you should steel yourself for that possibility, which could torpedo your current goals for your son but might put him on the fast track to employment, which is something that not all college grads can count on these days!
