Schoolchildren to universities!

I teach a course at the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Geneva called "Elementary Methods". This year, in addition to students, about forty schoolchildren will attend. In this way, the University of Geneva attracts the younger generation: those who pass this course will automatically receive credit for it if they enroll in the appropriate department of the university. In Germany, a similar practice has existed since 2002. During this time, about 1,700 schoolchildren managed to use such a system. Subsequently, when studying at universities, they generally perform well above average. In Switzerland, such a system appeared quite recently, in Geneva it is the second year, and for the first time so many schoolchildren have signed up, and for the course that I teach. This course is indeed accessible to schoolchildren: we solve Olympiad problems in mathematics with students, so the difference between third-year students (for whom this course is intended) and final-year students should not be great - however, we do not know about this yet.

According to the rules of this program, every 3-4 schoolchildren are assigned a tutor who will help during training, answer questions, etc. Thus, in addition to an unknown number of students (who may or may not enroll in the course), we have forty schoolchildren and ten tutors is quite a large crowd, so there are quite a lot of purely organizational problems that I didn’t have last year - I alone led groups of 12 people.

It would be nice if something similar existed in Russia: to allow schoolchildren (selected after a letter of motivation and with good grades in the required subjects) to attend an educational institution, participate in student life and take exams on the same basis as students. This will give them an idea of ​​the university, help them understand whether they want to go there, and make the transition from school life to student life easier. And it will be useful for universities - there will be an incentive to assign the best teachers to such courses, so as not to scare potential applicants.

When I myself was a schoolchild in Russia, I heard about something like this - for example, in Maykop, capable schoolchildren were sent to listen to calculus at the local university. Many universities have clubs or collaborate with specialized schools. I would like it to be more systematic - relatively speaking, a site where a student from St. Petersburg could see that they can send an application and then go to the Polytechnic on Tuesdays for the fourth class, they will tell something understandable and interesting and in the end, it will be counted automatically if he passes the exam. And to have a choice between different universities - in fact, no open day can give a truer idea than attending a course once a week and directly interacting with students.

Perhaps this is all there, and I'm banging on an open door, but searching on the Internet turned up nothing. If there is, it is inadequately small, closed, opaque and, as a result, unpopular.

Nikita Kalinin