What Is The Real Cost Of Advanced Classes For High Schoolers? A Mom And Former Teacher Explains
10:17 PM last October, I’m walking through the kitchen to grab a glass of water, and my 10th grader Lila is still hunched over the table, her laptop open to an AP Bio lab report. The microwave holds her half-eaten chicken nuggets, cold, that I put in there three hours earlier. Her soccer bag gapes open by the door, cleats still stinking of grass, and the pile of laundry she promised to put away an hour ago hasn’t been touched. I lean against the counter, and that’s when I see her shoulders shake just a little. She swipes at her cheek with the back of her hand, but I still see the wet streak. I ask what’s wrong, and she blows out a sharp breath and says she got a B- on her first AP Lang multiple choice quiz. “If I get a B in this class, my GPA drops, and I won’t get into pre-vet,” she says.
Lila was the one who wanted to take two APs and an honors class sophomore year. I was the one who encouraged her, honestly. I used to teach 11th grade English at our local public high school, I knew how sharp she was with reading and writing, I thought she could handle it. We both bought into the common line: more advanced classes = better college = better future. The first crack showed two weeks into the semester, when she texted me from school to say she was quitting art club. She’d gone every Wednesday after school since 7th grade, used to bring home half a dozen sketches a week of the backyard birds, the stray cat that hangs around our porch. She said she just didn’t have time to stay an extra hour. A week later, she canceled her weekly walk with my mom, her grandma, that they’d done every Friday since she was 8. Too much homework.
Everyone talks about the benefits of advanced classes: weighted GPA, college credit, a leg up for admissions. No one talks much about the cost. The obvious cost is fees: $96 per AP exam this year, so three classes add up to almost $300 out of pocket, a real burden for a lot of families. But the hidden costs are the ones that stick, the ones that don’t show up on a receipt.
The first big cost is room for curiosity and exploration. Lila fell in love with the idea of being a vet because she spent every summer as a kid helping our neighbor care for her rescue horses, spent rainy weekends binging nature documentaries and sketching wildlife. That curiosity is what would make her a good vet, not a high score on an AP Lang multiple choice quiz. But when you’re carrying three advanced classes, every unstructured minute gets eaten by homework. A month into the semester, she told me she hadn’t pulled out her sketchbook in three weeks. She didn’t have time. That’s a loss no grade can make up for.
The second cost is basic, steady physical and mental health. Lila started getting tension headaches every Sunday night, because she spent the whole weekend cramming homework, barely getting up from her desk except to eat. She stopped going to the optional extra soccer practices she used to love, just for messing around with her friends after school. She was too tired.
After that night in the kitchen, we sat down to figure it out. I didn’t give her any vague “just relax” talks, we did two concrete things. First, I had her do a full time audit: write down every single thing she did, from waking up to going to bed, for one full week. No skipping the 15 minutes of Instagram scrolling she did to decompress, no rounding down homework time to make it look better. When we added it up at the end of the week, she was spending 17 hours a week on homework for just her three advanced classes. That’s on top of 35 hours a week in school, 5 hours a week of required soccer practice, that adds up to 57 hours a week before she eats, showers, sleeps, or does anything else. That’s more hours than most full-time adult jobs.
Second, I had her rank every class and activity from most important to least, based only on how much she cared about it, not how it looked on a college application. Number one was AP Bio, no surprise. Number two was soccer. Number three was art club. Number four was AP Lang. That answer was pretty clear. We called her counselor the next day and dropped her down to regular 10th grade English.
I know what every parent reading this is thinking: what about college? That’s the question that keeps everyone loading up on advanced classes. But as a former teacher who’s talked to dozens of admissions officers at public and private colleges across the state, I can tell you this: most schools don’t expect 3-4 advanced classes a year starting in sophomore year. They’d rather see a student with 1-2 advanced classes in areas they care about, plus activities that show their passion, than a student who loaded up on classes, pulled a mix of Bs and Cs, and has no time for anything else. If you’re nervous, just go check the admissions page of 3-5 programs your kid is actually interested in. Almost all of them list exactly what they expect, and it’s almost never a dozen advanced classes. We checked the pre-vet program Lila’s looking at, and they just recommend 2-3 advanced science classes in high school, no extra English requirements.
The change has been small but steady. We added one non-negotiable rule: one full unstructured hour a day that can’t be used for homework, no exceptions. Lila uses hers to sketch or walk the dog with my mom on Fridays now. Her headaches stopped after three weeks. She’s back in art club.
It’s April now, and we’re still figuring it out. Last week she had a big AP Bio test and a research paper for English, and she stayed up later than she should have finishing. She still stresses about college sometimes. But her sketch of a red fox she did in art club is taped to our fridge right now, next to her 5th grade self-portrait. She still has a 3.8 GPA, she still wants to be a vet, and she laughs more than she did three months ago.
I get asked all the time by other parents if their kid should take another advanced class. I always tell them the same thing: every advanced class takes time that could be spent on something else. That’s the real cost. Ask your kid what they’re willing to give up to take it. If that thing they’re giving up doesn’t matter to them, great, go for it. But if it’s something they love, something that makes them who they are, that’s a cost that’s almost never worth it. This works for us right now, and that’s enough.
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