10 Best Cheap Online Courses For High School Students

As the time for college approaches, students may want to look into various courses they can take which could help them decide what they want to do in life, not to mention that any extra classes will look good in the application, so take a look at the best cheap online courses for high school students.

While numerous places offer extracurricular classes, especially during the summer, we decided to look at the world’s top universities and see what type of classes they are offering. Even if you end up studying elsewhere, at least you had the chance to learn something from a prestigious school before you even hit the necessary age. In addition to this, you may also want to check out these 10 most popular courses on Udemy right now and see if anything catches your eye.

These can prove to be priceless in the long run as kids get to figure out what type of studies appeals them the most. If they already have a clear interest in mind, then they might just love some in-depth study to learn more and get even more excited about college.

In order to create our list today, we took a look at the list of the world’s best universities and checked out which of them are offering free online classes to students. Keep in mind that the classes are ranked in the same order as the universities.

That being said, here are the best cheap online courses for high school students.

10. John Hopkins

At the John Hopkins Center for talented youth, you’ll find a wide range of online programs. According to the university, they’ve had some 20,000 pre-college students so far from all over the world, attending the summer, online, and family programs.

The classes vary from math, AP science, grammar, critical reading, computer science to writing and so much more. The best part about these courses being online is that you can go through them at your own pace.

The courses that they are offering are best suited for high school students that care Introduction to Java, Advanced Scratch Programming, Advanced web design, Java Script, Advanced Java Programming, and AP Computer Science, any of the English Language Development courses, as well as world languages. The Writing, Grammar, and Visual Fluency classes could also work for most students, particularly the visual communication one, as well as others who want to focus on writing for an audience, writing analysis and persuasion, poetry crafting, crafting fiction and more. Additionally, there are plenty of math courses available, as well as science and engineering classes, social sciences, and history.

Tuition costs between $360 and $2,125, the price depends on the length and type of course selected.

9. Cornell University

Over at Cornell University, there are plenty of courses designed for high school students which can be attended during the summer months and which could translate into Cornell University credits if you’re planning to attend it eventually.

They have plenty of topics that may appeal to you, ranging from Applied Economics and Management, American Studies, Anthropology, Biomedical Sciences, Economics, Human Development, Nutritional Science, Psychology and Statistical Science.

Tuition runs at $1,360 per credit, and high school students are not eligible for financial aid, which means you’ll have to foot the bill somehow.

These online courses are delivered to students via a web-based learning system called Blackboard, where you complete assignments within a scheduled time frame. Students will, however, interact with the instructor and other students by phone, email, and discussion boards to make everything easier for them.

8. Yale

Yale is another top university to offer online courses on our list of best cheap online courses for high school students for students from anywhere in the world. They built this online experience around video-base discussion sessions, which means that students will get to connect face-to-face to discuss the topics of their courses. With classes being only made out of 20 students, the faculty members will get to know each one of the students and help guide them better.

At the end of the summer, you’ll have earned Yale College credit, which is great if you dream of attending it.

There are multiple courses available, such as Abnormal Psychology, Brains of Genius: Mozart and Friends, Econometrics and Data Analysis I, Introduction to Macroeconomics, Reading and Writing the Modern Essay, Drugs, Brains, and Behavior, Jazz, Race, and Gender in America and more. They all have specific meeting times that students need to respect in order to attend properly.

Tuition fees rise to $3,900 for one course, with additional application fees and technology fees, pushing the cost up to $4,060. Since this is Yale we’re talking about the price isn’t that surprising, but it’s still lower than what other universities have to offer, and it’s a great opportunity for the future.

7. ETH Zurich

Over at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich University, you’ll find a lot of online courses to attend, each more interesting than the last.

The University’s free online courses cover a lot of topics, from autonomous mobile robots, building smart cities, or building the cities of the future, and much more. Each course lasts for a different number of weeks, depending on the topic and they require a certain number of hours dedicated to it per week. At the end of it all, you can even get a verified certificate for a small sum.

To give an example, the “Quality of Life: Livability in Future Cities,” covers urban planning, energy, climate, ecology and mobility and how they impact the life of a future city. This course lasts for 11 weeks and requires about 3 hours put in every week. For 44 euro, you can also get the verified certificate we were talking about before. Ten instructors are handling this course.

6. University College London

Our next top university to offer online courses on the list of best cheap online courses for high school students is the UCL in London. Each of the courses they offer comes with a new idea of what you may be interested to know – for instance, how to set up a digital business, which is such an important detail nowadays. You can also learn more about how to test and develop your ideas for creating an online business, or more about Geographic Information System and mapping, and so on.

One example is the Urban Graphics 3: Essential Urban Plans course which is a free online course on urban design analysis where you can also learn about the key 2D drawings necessary to present urban scaled analysis and design proposals. The course takes 10 to 20 hours and can be worked through at your own pace.

Each course has a different length and can either be worked through at the student’s own pace or within a certain number of weeks, making it one of the best cheap online courses for high school students.

5. Oxford University

We are continuing our list of best cheap online courses for high school students with the Oxford University that is one of the top schools in the world and has kept its reputation over the decades. Much like other powerful names in the education system, Oxford offers numerous online courses.
The Oxford University structured its online courses as weekly online meetings with as many as 32 students, although the cap for creative writing is set at 20, which should help maximize interaction between students and the tutor.

The courses cover numerous topics, such as the aforementioned Advanced Creative Writing, or bioethics for beginners, northern renaissance, Greek mythology, philosophy, ancient Egypt and more.

The tuition costs start at £260 but they can go up to £375, and the credits earned from the online short courses are transferable towards the Certificate of Higher Education program.

4. California Institute of Technology

California Institute of Technology, the next one on our list of best cheap online courses for high school students also known as Caltech, has a long history of offering students a great education. Well, the university also offers online learning programs for the future generations of scientists and engineers.

Caltech decided that for its sessions, it would rather use other popular platforms to offer its courses such as Coursera, iTunes U, or edX.

They are currently offering multiple-week courses on multiple topics, such as The Science of the Solar System, The Evolving Universe, Circuits and Systems, the Principles of Economics with Calculus, Quantum Cryptography and more. These courses are, for what we’ve checked, free, so you have no excuse not to pick one of them since they all sound so interesting.

3. Harvard

The third place on our list of best cheap online courses for high school students goes to Harvard that needs no introduction beyond its name, but one thing that is not that well known about it is that it offers online courses for students.

In fact, it has two types of programs for high schoolers – one that involves kids living at Harvard for a couple of weeks, and one that allows them to learn things online.

The Secondary School Program lasts for seven weeks, during which time you’ll get to learn about a wide range of topics, such as neuroscience, movies, philosophy, creative writing, computer science and so on. In fact, there are some 200 courses in over 60 subjects.

A 4-credit course costs $3,050, while an 8-credit course takes the price up a notch to $6,100, plus application fee.

2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Up next on our list of best cheap online courses for high school students is MIT. One of the best schools in the world offers online courses for high school students. Called MIT OpenCourseWare, they freely and openly made the material of thousands of MIT courses available online. The documents cover the entire MIT curriculum, so it’s like you’re there yourself, even if you’re on the other side of the world.

On top of the courses being free, you don’t even need to sign up, or enroll or anything of the like. You’ll just get to go through the material at your own pace. Of course, there’s no MIT credit at play here or certificates of any kind, but as the university puts it “knowledge is your reward.”

1. Coursera, edX, iTunes U

We kept the top spot not for a prestigious University, but rather for sites like Coursera, or edX, or even iTunes U. These are sites that you can use to download courses from countless Universities across the world.

For instance, you can learn about computer science from the University of Michigan, Duke, University of California, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Vanderbilt, Stanford, and countless others. Some of the content you’ll find on these sites is pure text, while other courses will be based on videos to help you along and you’ll even get to take tests.

While choosing a course from a well-known University may be a great idea and would help you in the long run, so would a course offered freely on one of these platforms. Of course, there are also courses you have to pay here, but we’re sure you can find something to suit your pocket and your passion.

That being said, these have been the best cheap online courses for high school students.