What Is the Real Cost of High Schoolers Taking Advanced Classes?
Last Tuesday, I pulled into the rain-slicked parking lot of my high school’s cross country practice 10 minutes early, and waited, wiping fog off the windshield with an old fast food napkin. When Lila, my 16-year-old junior, wrenched open the passenger door, her backpack slipping off one shoulder, her running socks squelching, she didn’t buckle her seatbelt like usual. She just dropped her bag on the floor and started crying, quiet heaving sobs that shook the whole car. She told me she’d stayed up until 1:30 a.m. the night before finishing her AP Biology lab report, skipped the team’s pre-meet pasta dinner to cram for an AP Language research paper, and got a B minus on her AP Psychology quiz that morning. “Everyone else has all A’s,” she said, wiping her nose on the back of her sleeve. “If I can’t even get an A in a class I signed up for, I’m never getting into the honors college.”
I’m not just a parent, I tutor part-time at the same high school, so I see this same story play out almost every week. Last month, a junior named Jake came to me for calc help, his hands shaking so bad he could barely hold his pencil. He told me he’d had a panic attack in the school cafeteria two nights before, after realizing he had three major deadlines in one week and hadn’t called his grandma back for her birthday for three weeks. His mom had pressured him to take four APs, because all the kids in their neighborhood were doing it, and he didn’t want to let her down.
Most people only talk about the financial cost of advanced classes, and that’s a real one. AP exams cost $97 each right now, which adds up to almost $300 for three classes, plus $20 to $30 per review book, and if you need extra help, tutoring can run $50 to $100 an hour. That’s a heavy burden for a lot of families, one that gets swept under the rug when everyone’s talking about college admissions. I talked to a mom last semester who spent $1,200 on private tutoring for her son’s four AP exams, and he only got a high enough score to earn college credit for one of them. That’s money they’d been saving for his first year of textbooks, gone for almost nothing.
But the bigger costs aren’t financial. They’re the small, quiet things you don’t notice until they’re gone. Lila used to bake chocolate chip cookies with me every Sunday, and read a new mystery novel every two weeks. She loved trying to teach our old cat to do tricks. Since she loaded up on advanced classes this fall, all of that stopped. Last month, I reminded her three times to call the dentist to schedule her cleaning, and she still forgot—she said her brain was so full of due dates and vocab terms that there was no room for anything else. She told me a few weeks ago that she can’t even be bothered to read for fun anymore, because “any time I start a book, I keep waiting for the study questions to pop up.” That’s the real cost: the loss of the space to just be a kid, to learn things that don’t get graded, to practice the small life skills that matter more than a transcript line.
After that car ride cry, we didn’t just sit around and talk about being supportive. We did concrete things, the same things I tell all the parents I work with to do. First, we checked when the schedule change deadline was—most high schools keep schedules open for the first three weeks of the semester, exactly for this kind of thing. We dropped AP Psych, and she switched into the regular introductory psychology class that the art teacher and the counselor co-teach, which is project-based and has no cumulative final. We made a rule: no guilt attached, no “you’re quitting” talk, just a recognition that three advanced classes was too much for her right now.
Then we put a hard rule in place: all homework stops at 10:45 p.m., all phones and laptops get charged on the kitchen counter, and lights are out by 11 p.m. If a paper isn’t done, that’s the teacher’s problem for assigning too much work, not hers. I even emailed all her AP teachers to let them know the rule, so there’s no surprise if an assignment is late occasionally.
It’s only been a month, and things aren’t perfect. Lila still stresses about college apps, and she still pulls an all-nighter once in a while before a big test. But last Sunday, she baked cookies again, and brought a whole Tupperware to her cross country team. Last night, I found her half-finished mystery novel on the kitchen table, dog-eared at chapter 12, a sticky note with a silly doodle sticking out of the binding. She even has time to walk the dog after dinner now, instead of holing up in her room the second she gets home.
I still don’t know if dropping that one AP will hurt her chances of getting into the honors college she wants. But I talked to an admissions counselor at that college at a fair last spring, and she told me something that stuck with me: they don’t count how many advanced classes you took. They look to see that you challenged yourself, but they’d rather see a B in two hard classes and an active life outside school than straight A’s in five advanced classes and nothing else. Most colleges don’t need another kid who can’t hold a conversation because they haven’t had time to talk to anyone outside of class in two years.
We’re still figuring it out. There’s no perfect answer, and every kid is different. Some kids thrive on the extra challenge of a full load of advanced classes, and that’s great. But for so many others, the cost is way higher than the test fees or the extra study time. It’s the small, good parts of being a teenager that you can’t get back. Last night, Lila paused her homework to watch our cat chase a moth around the kitchen light. She pulled out her phone, took a video, and sent it to her best friend. A few months ago, she would have never paused, never taken the time. That’s the cost we almost paid, and it’s the one no one tells you about when you’re filling out your class registration form.
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