Youngsters Go to College--and Thrive : Education: Cal State L.A.’s Early Entrance Program has opened advanced courses to more than 50 junior and senior high students in five years.

On the third floor of King Hall at Cal State Los Angeles a few weeks ago, 302 students took a college entrance test, wondering if they’ll make the grade for college. Their ages: mostly 12 and 13. If they score well, many will leave their junior high campuses for Cal State L.A. this summer or fall.

There always have been a few children across the country who make headlines by precociously starting college when their peers are just learning to skateboard. But Cal State’s Early Entrance Program is opening advanced education to a sizable number for whom junior high and high school are just not stimulating enough.

And though parents and educators have long worried about the effects of putting children with young adults, education specialists--and the students who have done it--are saying that for many it might be the best option.

Leland Davis, 13, of Reseda was frequently coming home from Porter Junior High’s Gifted Magnet school feeling frustrated. “He was being stifled at Porter, losing interest in studying,” said his mother, Launa, 44. The school’s group-learning approach paired hard-working youngsters with the less motivated, she said, and when Leland ended up with a B on a project he had spent hours and hours on, he was upset.

Then Leland read a flyer sent home from the magnet school announcing CSLA’s Early Entrance Program and inviting him to take the Washington Pre-College Test. He did--and scored better than 80% of the nation’s senior high school students. At first, the Davises found the idea of their son’s starting college at 13 overwhelming, but then decided it was worth a try.

Students from Sun Valley, Granada Hills, Northridge and Calabasas join Leland and others from Los Angeles and Orange counties in a two-hour commute to the CSLA campus in search of a challenging education.

It’s the only early entrance program in California and one of only three in the country, said Jan Slater, director of the program. Started by Estelle Gregory, an associate professor of psychology at CSLA, the program was modeled after a successful one at the University of Washington. The third program is at Johns Hopkins.

The program offers the children a transition period in which they can continue at their junior high or high school while attending CSLA part time. If they like it and do well--the program requires the students to maintain a B average--they can move to full-time college studies. In the last five years, more than 50 students have participated in the program.

The students aren’t just thrown into college life to sink or swim, but meet for 30 minutes a week with Slater for counseling. Slater said the students see each other between classes at the EEP office and also at scheduled social events, to give them the peer support and encouragement they might need.

There are now 27 young students, whose average age is 13 1/2, in the program. Oddly, Slater said, the students find life at CSLA less stressful, less violent and less socially frustrating than at their junior high schools.

“Keeping these kids on their hands in junior high school will depress them and put them into a self-destructive mode,” she said. “These kids don’t like the violence, the discrepancy in their values from the others that they find in junior high. The regular school doesn’t meet their intellectual needs, and, oddly, it doesn’t meet their social needs either.”

The youngsters, she said, are treated well by the other students on campus, who range in age from 10 to 70. Only one student in the history of the program has dropped out, returning to seventh grade. The broad ethnic representation at the university and the fact that it is a commuter school help make it a relatively easy campus on which to assimilate. “It’s not like USC, where it’s mostly 17- to 22-year-olds,” Slater said.

The professors usually don’t know the difference between the EEP students and the others. Phoebe Dea, a professor of chemistry, said she didn’t even know one student was only 12 when she did lab research with Dea. “Usually, they’re quite mature,” she said. “They look like little kids, but they don’t really behave like it. And academically, they’re stronger.”

John Chin, 14, was a student at A.E. Wright Middle School in Calabasas when a school counselor suggested he take the entrance exam. Chin said it took him a while to decide to enter the program, but he figured he would only get this sort of opportunity once.

He said the students are treated well on campus. “They assume we’re 18, I think,” said Chin, who is 5 feet, 9 inches tall, “and a lot of my friends don’t know I’m 14.”

Chin said he wasn’t trying hard enough in school before starting at CSLA. His mother, Alice, said she also felt that he wasn’t doing his best or getting good enough grades. “I worried that it would be hard for him to get into college unless he changed,” she said.

Now John is taking Biology 101, Math 91, music and world culture, and piano, and gets up twice a week at 5:30 a.m. to make his 8 a.m. class. Alice Chin drives 120 miles a day--30 miles there and back twice a day. “But it’s worth it,” she said. “He’s become a very happy person. There’s less pressure.”

Why is college less pressure than junior high for these students? According to Barbara Clark, professor of special education at CSLA and author of “Growing Up Gifted” (Charles Merrill, 1988), they are getting what amounts to inappropriate education in the average junior high school. “These children are two to eight years above other children their age. Their vocabulary, their concerns are different.”

In most schools, she said, children are grouped by age, and yet learning has nothing to do with age. “I don’t walk into a room at a party and say, ‘Who’s my age?’ and neither would these kids,” she said.

“All the research shows acceleration is a very positive thing for children,” she said, adding that she doesn’t know why school administrators are often reluctant to move high-achieving children ahead of their classmates. She said emphasis on a child’s age-based peer group is misplaced because bright children often don’t find others the same age to be very compatible.

The students in the Early Entrance Program tend to do exceptionally well, Slater said. “They’re excited about school; they start to open up; they don’t feel as oppressed as they did in secondary school.”

But the idea of jumping straight from junior high school to college is not something most parents or children find comfortable or appealing, at least at first. “I think there’s a myth about living through high school in America,” Slater said. “You’re supposed to go through this incredibly prolonged adolescence. They’ll miss the prom; they’ll miss the Friday night football game; but these kids won’t mind. Nobody’s growth is stunted from this program.”