It is obvious that grades are an important part of  getting accepted into a good college. However, does the education we are taught in high school really prepare students for college?

College is a scary experience, for some students, it involves moving from your house to an entirely new state. Here, we work on making  our school a great community, but sometimes, at college or when you get a job, it will not be the same sheltered, guided space as high school.

After asking two of the 2015 Glacier Peak graduates if high school really prepared then for college, I got similar answers. “Honestly, no. I’ve had to learn a lot as I have gone throughout college and I don’t believe that high school does enough to prepare you for what’s to come. At the same time, I don’t know what else I would say that needs to change to better help students,” New York college student Victoria Goudreau said.

Deciphering what she should have known prior to graduation left me wondering if school is too soft on students. “The course load for me is a lot, like the difficulty of classes and the pace increases almost exponentially. I wish I had known how to write a technical paper. The rest cannot be taught in a classroom. A lot of it is experience that you just don’t have until you get there,” Goudreau said.

I asked the same question to my brother, Grant Peltier who is studying at the University of Washington. “Glacier Peak did not prepare me for college. I truly think with my experience at University of Washington with it being such a large school, Glacier Peak could never have prepared me for the environment. With the small community at Glacier Peak, it is impossible to prepare for what it is like to be at a school of 40,000 people,” Peltier said.

I asked Peltier what he wished Glacier Peak would have made clearer in his college preparation. “ I wish I would have known how AP tests and ‘College In The High School’ affected your abilities later on in college because I was under the assumption that all College In The High School credits were basically worthless at the college level. However, I have now learned that some of those could have helped me have less credits once I got to University of Washington,” Peltier said.

One suggestion for something that could be improved is having staff members communicate with the students more frequently so they could see what students actually need to succeed. Also I believe staff should get students more interested in the career they want to pursue. After talking to some of the past graduates of Glacier Peak high school obviously it did not prepare these students for college. Changes must be made to better improve education.