Report on High School Scholars Taking Courses at Rutgers

Background

The Academic Regulations and Standards Committee and the Admissions and Recruitment Committees were jointly given the following charge.

Survey programs at other universities that enable outstanding high school students to register for and take appropriate college courses during their senior year. Make recommendations to establish a formal program for outstanding high school seniors in Central New Jersey to register for and take appropriate courses at Rutgers New Brunswick/Piscataway.

A number of schools offer such programs.  At UCLA there is an honors program that you only get into with high PSAT scores. It lets UCLA know about top local students so that they can attempt to recruit them, and gets the students already started at UCLA with a streamlined mechanism for admissions. (Unfortunately, it has been cut recently by the California budget shortfall.)

Organizational issues about programs at Rutgers

First, finding information about such programs at Rutgers is difficult.  Searching Rutgers Web sites (as a high school advisor would do) for keywords like "High School Scholars Program" reveals nothing related to University College (UC), who has had nominal control over this program in the past, or to University Undergraduate Admissions (UUA). Very little is found about "High School Scholars Program" either, except for the Douglass and Johnson and Johnson programs (to be discussed later).

At the October 2003 Faculty Council meeting, Vice President Furmanski was asked who to approach for information about this charge. This will be the responsibility of the next VP for Student Affairs (who has not been chosen as of April 2004). Checking with the outgoing VP for Student Affairs, Emmett Dennis, who has not had responsibility for this, led to the University College program discussed below. University College did not seem to be coordinating efforts with UUA.

On the website for "Ask Colonel Henry" (colonelhenry.rutgers.edu) there is an answer to someone's question as follows:

• "Rutgers University has a program, called the High School Scholars Program, that encourages gifted high school students to take courses at Rutgers on a part-time basis for college credit. Students are given release time by their secondary schools to attend classes at the University. Students are also enrolled at their high school while they take university classes. The program is offered strictly during the academic year. If you are interested in the High School Scholars Program, you should contact the designated admissions counselor on the campus you'd like to attend." For New Brunswick, it lists Larry Jones in ASB 202)

This information is out of date.  The program was created in about 1980, as part of the "Office of student academic support and achievement" and run by former Assistant VP for Academic Admissions Dick Nurse until his retirement in the late 1990s. In its heyday, it involved about 35 students. The home web site http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~ruretent still exists - but all the links on the page, including the one to "Pre-College Programs", were removed over 5 years ago, and that office was reorganized out of existence. It is now defunct.

With the hiring of Corinne Webb (around 1997), the office of University Undergraduate Admissions (UUA) was created. Nancy Pullen has been coordinating the High School Honors program from UUA since then. However, it has not had high priority with Admissions, and as a result the number of HS Honors students has dropped from a high of 35 students to a low of 1 student (this year). This program is essentially defunct.

One anecdote about the difficulty of having high school students take classes at Rutgers: last Fall (2003), Prof. Krenos tried to get a gifted East Brunswick High School student into his Organic Chemistry course. Neither UUA nor UC were interested. Cook College (Dean Hills) was helpful and agreed to let the student register through their college. At the last minute, transportation became an issue and the student did not enroll at Rutgers.

As this anecdote illustrates, there are several technical issues confronting any High School outreach program at Rutgers. Commuting logistics is a major problem: the students cannot live far away, and often need a parent to drive them to Campus. Often this commuting takes place during rush hour. There are also new NJ regulations about "high school internships" (see option 2 under http://www.state.nj.us/njded/news/0107grad.htm) for graduation requirements, set January 7th by State Board of Education.

Further, not only is there minimal administrative interest in and funds for restarting such a High School Scholars program, UUA feels that it aggravates the student drain of bright students out of New Jersey.  From a meeting with VP Webb and Nancy Pullen, it appears that their perception is that it is not useful unless it results in getting them to matriculate at Rutgers. In 1997, Governor Whitman initiated and funded a series of merit scholarship initiatives. The result is that 21% of this year's incoming class are "high profile" students on merit scholarship; this was 5.6% in 1996. However, in order to increase the yield of "high-profile" students coming to Rutgers, they feel there is an urgent need for faculty involvement both before they apply to College and after Rutgers has admitted them. VP Webb feels that 1-day orientations involving faculty in the spring/early summer would be a much more useful recruiting tool and has asked me appeal to you. Allegedly, 20 faculty members would turn the recruiting tide.

What efforts currently exist?

There are many ad hoc efforts to attract high school students to Rutgers.

• University College ran a "rent-a-faculty" program, during 2001-F2003, notably to Highland Park High School. Originally, Highland Park paid for about 15 students to take Calculus at Rutgers as a cost-effective measure. This year, HPHS is training someone on-site.
• University College High School (Scholars) Program: Dr. Marc Manganaro at University College (and English Dept) handles the teaching of the very few Rutgers courses (English and Statistics) to select high school students for advanced placement credits.
• Johnson&Johnson and The Office of Minority Undergraduate Science Programs jointly run something called the New Brunswick Scholars' Saturday Academy Program, which meets Saturdays on the Douglass MSLC (http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~mckoy).
• There seems to be a hodge podge of "nonmatriculated" programs at Rutgers for High School Students. This involves perhaps 90 High School students actually taking classes at Rutgers this year.
• Waksman Student Scholars Program, operating since 1993, and now run by Sue Colletta. This has a summer phase - bringing teachers and students on campus - and an academic year phase consisting of a series of six workshops and a poster session to present results. They are awarded 3 college credits during the Spring Semester. According to Dilip Pandya and Ken Iuso, this involves about 70 students per year. This is supported by NIH grant (http://avery.rutgers.edu/WSSP)
• The Douglass Project runs various pre-college programs for high school women interested in Math/Science/Engineering (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~dougproj)
• The Gelfand Correspondence School for Mathematics, which does classwork by mail correspondence (http://gcpm.rutgers.edu)
• The Young Scholars Program in Discrete Math. This is an intensive 4-week summer program, sponsored by AT&T. (http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/ysp/)
• The Governors School of Engineering and Technology, also a 4-week summer program (http://www.govschool.org/new/engtech.htm)
• The Physics department also runs a summer program.
• Some High School students register for Summer Session III classes. The contact here is Tom Kujawski, the Director of the Summer Session.

Do these efforts help?

The Rutgers Admissions Office believes that high school students taking classes at Rutgers do not generally attend Rutgers, using Rutgers as an incubator for admission into elite schools.  It turns out that their office has only looked at the 2002 Waksman numbers - 7/46, or 15%. In addition, it ignores the fact that Waksman students are required to go back to their High Schools and spread the word, or recruit, for Rutgers. Further data concerning enrollments of students in the Waksman Program are as follows:

Spring 99: 46 enrolled in the course, 11 later became Rutgers students;
Spring 00: 68 enrolled in the course, 20 later became Rutgers students;
Spring 01: 50 enrolled in the course, 12 later became Rutgers students;
Spring 02: 46 enrolled the course, 7 later became Rutgers students;
Spring 03: 62 enrolled in the course, 9 later became Rutgers students

Thus until 2001 about 25-30% later enrolled at Rutgers, while only in recent years the percentage has been about 15%. This may partly be due to a drop in resources for the program.

Conclusions and Recommendations

1. There is no coordination at Rutgers for High School student programs. There should be.
2. Having High School students take classes at Rutgers is a more effective recruitment tool than was suspected. We should explore ways to make this more effective.