By defnition

ok, so I hate having to explain this all the time,
so I decided to wikipedia search "running start", and by golly it's on there!
so here it is.. Now whenever someone asks about how I started college at 16 I can just give them a link to wikipedia, or send them to this blog post..

I'm sick of people thinking I'm super genius or something,
thousands of kids in Washington do this.
It is pretty common here.
In my city alone there's 130 people in this program. (there's two schools in my city by the way..)


The Running Start program is an effort by the state of Washington to reward high-performing high school students by providing them with early admission to college.It is very similar to dual enrollment programs common at public and private colleges and universities in other states.

Piloted in the early 1990s and officially approved to begin in the fall of 1993, the Running Start program offers up to two years of paid tuition at any state-run community college or four-year university to students in their junior or senior year of high school. Juniors who can pass the entrance exam for a local community college may take part or all of their coursework at the community college. Their tuition is fully covered by the state, and successfully passing a course earns a student both high school and college credit for the course.

The system was designed to make it possible for a motivated high schooler to take all their classes for their final two years of high school at the community college: at the end of those two years, the student would have completed the necessary credits for high school graduation, as well as having completed the necessary college credits to receive an associate's degree. In practice, many students choose to take only a few classes at the college, partly because of the difficulty of college coursework, and partly to keep from missing out on the social life at high school. Students are only eligible to have 18 credits per quarter paid for, and they may only have tuition covered in the fall, winter, and spring quarters of their junior and senior years in high school.They may, however, attend during the summer quarter as long as they come up with their own sources of money for the tuition costs. In most cases, students are responsible for paying any fees, transportation, and book costs as well.

When the program first started it was greeted with some initial resistance at community colleges and universities by professors who feared they would be teaching to sixteen year olds who neither had the maturity nor academic discipline to excel at the college level. This skepticism was quieted at first due to the fact that most of the students participating during the first few years of the program tended to be among the top academically in their high schools and took the college courses very seriously since most were there to prepare for transfer to a four-year university.

[edit] Colleges

* Bates
* Bellevue Community College
* Bellingham
* Big Bend
* Cascadia
* Centralia
* Clark
* Clover Park
* Columbia Basin
* Edmonds
* Everett
* Grays Harbor
* Green River
* Highline
* Lake Washington
* Lower Columbia
* Olympic
* Peninsula
* Pierce Fort Steilacoom
* Pierce Puyallup
* Renton
* Seattle Central
* Seattle North
* Seattle South
* Seattle Voc Institute
* Shoreline
* Skagit Valley
* South Puget Sound
* Spokane
* Spokane Falls
* Tacoma
* Walla Walla
* Wenatchee Valley
* Whatcom Community College
* Yakima Valley