Eastfield College is becoming so overrun with high school students that the Dallas County Community College District should rename the college Eastfield High School. 
Eastfield currently claims there are about 400 high school students enrolled on campus. They project to have almost 700 by this fall. As of April 1, students are required to carry campus-issued ID cards, and a new districtwide policy also mandates all students will receive progress reports in their classes, just like in high school. 
As a student who has been here for seven semesters, it’s now commonplace to see the teenage horde almost everywhere you go, especially in the early afternoon. This wasn’t the case during my first semester. 
I supposed depending on the success of the new high school-oriented policies and programs, the administration will likely implement designated blocks for lunch break, recess and nap time. 
Everywhere they go, these high schoolers leave behind litter, unkempt break areas, faint wafts of Hot Cheeto dust and even the occasional used condom or two. 
Don’t get me wrong. I remember being a high school kid, and that’s why I want Eastfield to better prepare high school students for college. 
But the last thing I’d want is for Eastfield to hold a high school student’s hand every step of the way. That’s probably the worst way to prepare anyone for college and real-world expectations. 
While I encourage any high school student who even considers going to college to give it a shot, I think it defeats the purpose of going to college just to attend a class already full of high school students. 
While they are by no means second-class students, the high schoolers need to understand that Eastfield wasn’t made almost 50 years ago with them in mind. 
Eastfield was made to provide an affordable means of education to the surrounding community, and whether the district wants to give high school students an accessible path to a degree, the DCCCD needs to know that this will come at a cost. 
It’s ridiculous that there are college courses primarily filled with high school students. What college student wants to attend a class full of disruptive teenagers? What college professor wants to walk into a class full of students lacking in maturity? 
To any high schoolers reading this, I don’t bear a grudge against you. I’m just worried you won’t get the wake-up slap you need to adapt to the college environment. You’ll have to learn that your college professors and future employers won’t think it’s as funny as you do when you turn in assignments late and pester your classmates or co-workers for attention. 
You need to realize that college standards shouldn’t be lowered to accommodate you. If colleges keep lowering their standards and expectations, then they might as well become high schools. 
— Andrew Walter is an electrical engineering major and copy editor at The Et Cetera 
https://eastfieldnews.com/2019/04/15/dcccds-growing-early-college-high-school-programs-changing-campus-culture/