What Is The Real Cost Of High Schoolers Taking Advanced Classes? A Teacher’s Perspective
It’s 4:15 on a Wednesday, I’m taping closed a box of lab dissections in my AP Biology room when Lila, a junior I’ve had since September, leans against my door frame, shoulders hunched. Her cross country hoodie has a coffee stain on the cuff, her backpack unzipped to show a crumpled granola bar and a half-written college essay sticking out. She’s supposed to leave 15 minutes ago for her little sister’s first playoff soccer game, but she’s here re-doing a lab that she missed when she stayed home sick with a stress migraine last week.
I ask her if she’s okay, and she blinks, a tear falling straight onto her lab worksheet. “I don’t know why I’m still in this class,” she says. She signed up for five advanced classes this year: three APs, two dual enrollment. Her dad told her that any less, and she’d throw away her shot at in-state scholarship money. She hasn’t gone to a cross country practice in three weeks, because she uses that time to do AP Calculus homework. She’s missed all but one of her sister’s games this season. “I used to love science,” she says. “Now I just hate staring at my notes until my eyes hurt.”
I’ve had this conversation at least once a week this semester. Ten years ago, when I started teaching, most juniors took one or two advanced classes, tops. The overachievers took three. Now, more than half my junior class is taking three or more, and a handful are taking five. The sticker price for dual enrollment or AP tests is obvious—$98 per AP exam, a few hundred dollars per dual credit class—but the real cost isn’t something you see on a tuition bill. It’s the stuff that gets cut to make room for all that extra work.
Last semester, I had Javi, a senior in AP Language, who stopped showing up to the after-school writing club I advise. He’d been bringing his guitar to club meetings the year before, writing terrible, funny songs about his friends, and I thought he just lost interest. A month later, his mom emailed me saying he’d failed his first AP Physics quiz, and he wouldn’t talk about why. When we pulled him in to talk, he told us he’d quit rock climbing, the thing he’d done every weekend since he was 12, because he couldn’t spare four hours a week anymore. He hadn’t slept more than six hours a night in two months. “I’m so tired I can’t even write a decent essay anymore,” he said.
I gave Lila an apple from the stash I keep in my desk for kids who forget lunch, and we ran through the facts. She wants to be an elementary school teacher. The regional state university 40 minutes away has one of the best elementary education programs in the state, and their average incoming student has two APs. She didn’t need five. I told her there’s no unwritten rule that says you have to keep a class that’s sucking all the energy out of you. She dropped it a week later, switched to the regular biology section. Last week, I saw her at the grocery store, and she had her sister’s silver playoff medal pinned to her hoodie. She told me she got an 89 on her last bio test, she’s running cross country again, and she even made it to the last two soccer games.
The thing I tell parents at every parent-teacher conference these days is this: before you sign off on your kid’s class schedule, ask one concrete question: “Can you handle this schedule and still get eight hours of sleep most nights, and still do at least one thing every week that doesn’t have a grade attached?” If the answer is no, cut one. It’s that simple. I’ve had too many parents tell me they don’t want their kid to “fall behind” or “look bad to colleges,” but what looks worse to a college: one less advanced class, or a transcript full of Bs because your kid was too overloaded to get As, or a kid that can’t even talk about anything other than school in their interview?
Another concrete tip most parents don’t know: If your kid tells you they want to drop an advanced class halfway through the semester, don’t make them hire a tutor or push through to the end “to prove they can finish what they started.” Let them switch. A lot of schools have a drop deadline a month or two into the semester that doesn’t show up on your transcript—ask your counselor about that, it’s not widely advertised. If it’s past the deadline, most schools will still let you switch to a lower level with a withdraw that doesn’t hurt your GPA. It’s not quitting, it’s adjusting your load to fit your life.
It doesn’t always work out perfectly. Javi dropped AP Physics last year, went back to rock climbing, got a B in regular Physics, and got accepted to the environmental science program he wanted. His dad still mentions sometimes that he wonders if Javi would have gotten into a bigger name school if he’d stuck with the AP. That pressure doesn’t go away, not when every college ranking post on Instagram makes it look like you need a 4.0 and six APs to get anywhere.
Lila still stresses about college apps sometimes, she still stays up late writing essays some weeks. But she doesn’t get migraines every other week anymore. She laughs more in class now. That’s the trade off, right? Advanced classes can be great for kids who love the subject and have the space for them. But the cost of taking too many is too often the part of being a teenager that actually matters most. It’s not something you can put on a transcript, but it sticks with you a lot longer than any exam score.
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