College bound--without a High School diploma

There's an interesting article in today's New York Times concerning the growing phenomenon of students going to college without High School diplomas: Going right to college

Some excerpts:

...[M]any colleges — public and private, two-year and four-year — will accept students who have not graduated from high school or earned equivalency degrees.

...This year [in California], 47,000 high school seniors, about 10 percent of the class, have not passed the exit examinations required to graduate from high school. They can still enroll in many colleges, although they are no longer eligible for state tuition grants.

State Senator Deborah Ortiz, Democrat of Sacramento, has proposed legislation to change that.

"As long as the opportunity to go to college exists for students without a diploma," Ms. Ortiz said, "qualifying students from poor or low-income families should remain entitled to college financial aid."

Many community colleges and two-year commercial colleges take these students, as do some less selective four-year colleges. At Interboro Institute, a large commercial college in Manhattan, 94 percent of the students last year did not have a high school diploma. Yet most received federal and state financial aid, up to $9,000 a student for the neediest....