A sneak preview of university life

MY TY: Lola Boormanof St Andrew's College in Booterstown on a unique college preparation course being offered by New York's Columbia University and other US Ivy League colleges

'THERE IS absolutely nocomparison to school!" says Sarah Albala from Westchester, noting the contrast between her school and Columbia University's High School summer programme. In August, Sarah participated in Columbia's creative writing course. "It allowed me to express myself without boundaries," she says. Yet, after a gruelling school year, why are American teenagers so eager to take part in such an intensive course?

American Universities' High School programmes offer secondary school students, from third to sixth year, an opportunity to attend a college-style course at a university. Course options range from creative writing to engineering to constitutional law, with each course-subject rooted in a department of the university. It gives students a taste of college life and allows them to study a subject intensively, which they may wish to continue in university. Most of the Ivy Leagues - Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown and Yale - offer these programmes and recently many non-Ivy League schools have taken them on too. The idea has also spread to Europe, as Oxford and Cambridge offer similar courses.

High School programmes were set up in Ivy League universities in the 1980s. The current Vice Dean of the School of Continuing Education at Columbia, Paul McNeil, was the founder of the university's now highly successful programme. "Essentially, I was looking to create an enrichment experience for talented students whose intellectual and cultural needs were not being met in their local high schools," he explains.

Columbia's programme began with only seven course options and 89 students. This year it catered to 1,600 students participating in over 20 course options. Of these, 30 percent of Columbia's high school students were non-US citizens, and most of them boarded at the university dorms. The majority of the foreign students at Columbia participated in the "College Preparatory Programme", a course that prepares students in areas that will aid them in their applications to American universities.

"There is more and more pressure for high school students to have a challenging academic programme in their background," says Darlene Giraitis, director of secondary school programmes at Columbia. This raises the frequently asked question: are students using these programmes as a tool to get into Ivy League schools? As competition has increased at these colleges, this is sometimes the case.

From a student's perspective, the programmes offer a chance to explore and kindle their interests. Scherezade Khan, from New York City, described the appeal as "not just learning from a textbook or a handout . . . it's listening to others who say truly thought-provoking things. You learn to keep your ears and eyes open, and that's the best way to learn."

Given that our education system is focused almost entirely on passing exams, wouldn't it be refreshing for Irish universities to offer something similar? The closest thing we have is the Centre for Talented Youth Ireland in DCU, but, to attend the courses, one must sit another dreaded exam - the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test.