A casual observer of Florida’s education scene might expect that graduates of the state’s eight collegiate high schools associated with institutions in the Florida College System would be superbly prepared to take on math-intensive STEM majors at the state’s public universities.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the experience I’ve had in my own FSU physics classroom.
The eight collegiate high schools aim to have students earn associate of arts (A.A.) degrees while they are completing their high school diplomas. Especially during their junior and senior high school years, students take dual enrollment classes instead of standard high school courses. The courses students take satisfy both Florida’s high school graduation requirements and the general education requirements for an A.A. degree.
The eight collegiate high schools are scattered throughout the state. Florida Southwestern College has two collegiate high school campuses – one in Charlotte County and the other in Lee County. The State College of Florida has two collegiate high school campuses as well, in Manatee and Sarasota Counties. St. Petersburg College has two collegiate high school campuses, both in Pinellas County (one is called “North”). Polk State College has a collegiate high school located in Polk County. Finally, Northwest Florida State College has a collegiate high school campus in Okaloosa County.
The collegiate high schools don’t all host students for all four high school years, but both Florida Southwestern College collegiate schools do. This past fall, the numbers of students in each grade at the Charlotte campus varied between 78 and 110. At the Lee campus, the largest grade had 106 students and the smallest 83.
The State College of Florida Manatee campus also hosts all four years, with grade sizes ranging from 71 to 83 students.
However, three of the collegiate schools only host students for three years – 10th, 11th and 12th grades. The sizes of the grades at the first St. Petersburg College collegiate school campus range from 71 to 89; at the St. Petersburg North campus, the grades range in size from 63 to 82 students. At Northwest Florida State College’s collegiate high school, the grade sizes range from 75 to 110.
The remaining two collegiate high schools – at Polk State College and at State College of Florida’s Venice Campus – host only 11th and 12th grades. Polk State has large grades, with 161 students in 11th grade and 170 students in 12th grade this past fall. The State College of Florida Venice program is much smaller with 48 11th graders and 47 12th graders.
While the collegiate high schools host large numbers of college-bound students, there are relatively few students taking the physics and calculus courses that faculty and professional organizations say high school students should take to prepare for bachelor’s degree programs in fields like engineering, the physical sciences, computing and the life and health sciences. I take the course enrollment numbers here from the Florida Department of Education web site (which also provides the grade size numbers above). To preserve student privacy, the FLDOE only quotes numbers of students registered in a course at a school if there are ten or more taking it. If the course is being taken by at least one student but by fewer than ten, then the spreadsheet gives an asterisk instead of a number.
Nevertheless, we can still draw some conclusions about student course-taking from the FLDOE spreadsheets. During the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters, there was only one instance in which there were as many as ten students taking a physics course. At Polk State College’s Collegiate High School, ten students took PHY C020, a general education physics course, in the spring. In all other cases – at all the collegiate high schools and during the fall and spring semesters – there were fewer than ten students enrolled in each physics class.
At several of the collegiate high schools, all or nearly all of the students take a standard high school chemistry class that is either Honors or non-Honors. It is likely that students take this subject during 10th grade. Of course, in the standard biology-chemistry-physics science sequence physics is taken in 11th grade. At that point, students at collegiate high schools are supposed to be taking all dual enrollment classes. It appears that most of the students at these schools never take a physics class at all.
The situation with calculus is not optimum, either. There were several instances in which 10 or more students took the first calculus class for STEM majors, MAC 2311, which is equivalent to the Advanced Placement Calculus AB course that is taken by about 15,000 Florida high school students each year. During the fall semester, 14 students took MAC 2311 at the Florida Southwestern College Collegiate High School campus in Lee County; 11 took the same class in the fall at the State College of Florida campus in Manatee County; 22 took the course at Northwest Florida State College; and 11 took the course at St. Petersburg College’s main collegiate school campus. In the spring, another 15 took MAC 2311 at the State College of Florida Manatee County campus; 14 at the Florida Southwestern College campus in Lee County; and 16 took it at the St. Petersburg College North Pinellas campus. These numbers should be larger at high schools that are intended to provide outstanding preparation for bachelor’s degree programs.
The physics problem at the collegiate high schools could be easily remedied. A general education physics course that emphasizes the concepts of motion, forces and energy in mechanics and that uses evidence-based instructional practices would be a positive experience and widen the career options for every student. Each collegiate high school has access to college physics faculty, so making such a course available for every student in the fall semester of 11th grade should not be a problem.
More importantly, students would have to be more aggressively advised regarding course selection than they are now. Students (and parents) should be told that taking physics and calculus are important for a wider range of college majors than they realize, and that taking those subjects during early college opens a wide array of career opportunities that they might find attractive in a few years.
That may not seem like college to some, but even universities have figured out that students need more prescriptive advice than they have been getting in years past. It may be time for collegiate high schools to learn that lesson as well.
Bridge to Tomorrow 