Required Setbacks: The graduation requirements for the state of Kansas and SMSD leave students at a disadvantage when applying for colleges

Senior Jane Doe is about to graduate high school.

She has a 4.0 GPA, 31 on the ACT and founded a nonprofit for breast cancer awareness. She took multiple AP, IB and honors classes. She glided through with the minimum number of core class credits by junior year and decided to focus on purely engineering classes at the CAA during her senior year.

Jane is at the top of her class, yet she gets deferred and ultimately rejected from a semi-prestigious state school.

When it comes down to it, schools throw her application away before they even notice her national debate title or how she provided housing to the homeless through a DECA project. All they take note of is that she didn’t take a science class her senior year of high school.

And while this specific situation is hypothetical, it’s a reality for many Kansas seniors.

The graduation requirements in Kansas and the Shawnee Mission School District fall short of admission requirements for many universities.

To graduate high school in Kansas, you need four English credits, three credits of math, history and science, one physical education and fine arts credit and six units of other electives, according to the Kansas Department of Education.

Students unknowingly deceive themselves out of getting into competitive colleges.

Selective colleges tend to require at least two years of a foreign language, according to Weil College Advising. I’m not devaluing some of the required courses in the district when I say this, but adding a foreign language requirement benefits students more than taking 15 semesters of art and weights classes.

And while SMSD’s current requirements are reasonable for students who aren’t going to college or are planning to attend a state school with a high acceptance rate, other students who apply to reach schools or more selective universities don’t have the same shot at acceptance.

A student with a GPA of 4.4 shouldn’t be rejected from Purdue University — with a 53% acceptance rate — solely because they chose to take additional business classes instead of a fourth year of math.

And yes, if they have the goal of getting into a prestigious university it’s up to them to choose the classes to help get them there. But tell me why taking consumer math — a lower level math class — is more valuable to colleges than working on a year-long integrated marketing campaign project in marketing applications that ultimately wins state.

Even after SMSD revised the graduation requirements this year — adding half a credit of STEM and communications and removing a semester of physical education and English — there’s still a large margin of error when it comes to the college application process.

Second semester freshmen are unknowingly ruling out colleges when they leave a non-required social studies class off their schedule for the following year. And seniors that take a one-semester regular government class are also potentially rejected due to a lack of credits.

I do agree that it’s the students choice to not take certain classes, but it would help to give students the guidance they need to be in a good position for senior year college applications by emphasizing different schools and how required high school credits vary for each one.

Most students don’t even know what school they want to go to at the beginning of their senior year. And if they choose to opt out of a science or math class, they’ve already run out of time to alter their schedule.

The best way to avoid unfair admission decisions is for SMSD to alter their graduation requirements to ensure students are set up for success.