How to Combat Senioritis

By Rebecca Winters Keegan/ Los Angeles

Early symptoms of the disease--lethargy, lack of focus, difficulty making decisions--often appear in the fall. By spring the average, healthy high school senior may have completely succumbed. Senioritis attacks high-achieving, average and struggling students alike. By this time in the school year, most college-bound seniors have turned in their applications and received their acceptance letters. Many of them understandably feel entitled to a little downtime. The 30% of seniors who aren't headed for higher learning may not have figured out what they want to do after graduation, but they are pretty sure that it won't require algebra or Shakespeare.

In short, the second semester of the last year of high school is a kind of waiting room for the next stage of life. But over the past few years, high schools and colleges have begun experimenting with ways to keep students more engaged during the period between homecoming weekend and the senior prom. "Senior year in the U.S. has been based on the 19th century premise that 80% of students will go back to the farm after graduation," says Stanford University education professor Michael Kirst, who co-wrote the 2004 book From High School to College. "In small ways, people are starting to reclaim senior year." Those efforts include internships that keep seniors motivated by allowing them to explore their passions, dual-enrollment programs on college campuses that offer a sneak preview of the higher-education experience and tests designed to alert those likely to have trouble keeping up in college that they should buckle down.

Sara Maghen, 17, leaves school one period early this semester, but she isn't spending the time chatting online with friends or napping at the beach. Instead the senior at private Milken Community High School in Los Angeles commutes across town to intern at Los Angeles Superior Court. While she decides which University of California campus she will attend next fall, Maghen sorts courthouse mail, registers payments of parking tickets and observes trials. She witnesses things that few people outside the legal profession will ever see--like a private-settlement conference between two attorneys and a judge on a $600,000 personal-injury case. "My parents always told me I'd make a great lawyer, 'cause I love to debate," she says.

Maghen is one of 27 seniors at her school who take part in the Wise Individualized Senior Experience (WISE) program, a not-for-profit internship initiative in place in nearly 70 public and private high schools in California, New York, Florida and nine other states. Seniors in WISE earn class credit by completing unpaid internships in their areas of interest. "The students begin to see a connection between their academics and their life goals," says Nancy Schneider, who founded Milken's WISE program in 2000. "Their motivation soars, and they become very committed to meeting their responsibilities." This year Schneider's students are working with a chef and a surgeon, among others. "It's an opportunity to gain real-life experience," says Maghen, who is considering a career as a judge. "This is way more interesting than studying for my advanced-placement bio test."

For other seniors, it is not the academics of high school that fail to captivate; it's the social environment. By the end of her junior year, Sarah Ferszt, 17, of Wakefield, R.I., had already been to four proms. When most of her friends graduated, she began cutting class and losing focus. "High school was torture," says Ferszt. "I'd grown out of it. For some people, senior year just doesn't make sense." Kevin Quinn, Ferszt's counselor at South Kingstown High School, helped make her final year more meaningful by directing Ferszt to a dual-enrollment program at the local community college. There she is finishing earning her high school credits and beginning college-level classes. "Seniors need something to gravitate to and be re-energized by," says Quinn. When South Kingstown High began offering dual enrollment 10 years ago, it was primarily for top students who wanted the chance to take courses at nearby Brown University. Now 15 to 20 students each year, about 7% of the senior class, choose to enroll in a variety of institutions, including a culinary school and several technical academies. For Ferszt, who plans to transfer to Florida International University in Miami in August, the move was "a stepping stone," she says. "I wasn't ready to go away to college, but I was ready for more freedom."

The best cure for some cases of senioritis is a strong dose of reality. More than 50% of students entering college in the U.S. require remedial course work once on campus. Two years ago, the California State University system launched the Early Assessment Program (EAP), which encourages 11th-graders to take a test to gauge their college readiness in English and math. Some juniors who expect to coast to college find out they will have to work even harder their senior year to improve the skills they will need to thrive in a Cal State school. Other students who had not considered themselves college material discover that they are better equipped than they thought and are inspired to make the most of their final high school year and start thinking of college as a serious option. "A lot of students aren't using their senior year as effectively as they should," says Allison Jones, Cal State's vice chancellor of academic affairs. "We're trying to give them an early-warning signal so they take the courses they need to take, instead of taking it easy."

Andrew Halstead, 19, got the signal loud and clear when he didn't pass the math portion of the EAP test two years ago. "I was ready, essentially, to take senior year off," says Halstead, now finishing his freshman year at California State University, Fresno. "Then I learned that I was worse off in math than I thought." So although he didn't need the additional credits to graduate, Halstead took extra math and science classes that he thought would help better prepare him for college-level work. "When my friends were going out senior year, I was studying," he says. Next week Halstead, who is contemplating a history major, will take his math final. Since he has been scoring above the class average all semester, "I feel pretty confident," he says.