I'd agree with you if this were a kid in high school headed for university in her own country. But she's not - she'll be moving to a country with a completely different system. She has little or no access to adults IRL who know anything about the US system, definitely none who has the least knowledge about transfer requirements from northern virginia community colleges to Virginia universities, nor has she access to print material, info sessions, older peers or siblings with information or experiences she could draw on. Radically accelerated gifted 15 year old starting college are rare enough, radically accelerated gifted 15 year olds with a high school degree from Australia making a move to the US must be pretty unique.
Honestly, then I'd say that if she's too young to be even taking the lead in looking at colleges,
she's too young to be thinking about college. I say this not to be mean, but to try to help someone avoid what could be a very difficult situation.
This is a general point: colleges expect students to be able to handle their own problems and challenges. Very young students may have the intellectual capacity to handle college chemistry or college calculus, but they often lack executive function skills that they need to be able to succeed. Many colleges in the US won't accept late homework. So if you forgot or blew it off, it's TOO BAD, and you get a 0. If you missed taking the online quiz before the deadline, it's TOO BAD, and you get a 0.
This is a difficult problem with HG+ kids. I know because I have a 14-year-old who's in a dual enrollment program at a community college. In spite of help from the high school side, the executive function demands are very high. The online problem sets have to be done at 7. If they aren't, he's out of luck. Ditto for the quizzes and other stuff.
Add to this that the colleges do NOT want mom and pop to get involved, and you get a situation that can set up a young student for some hard times. These kids are at an age when they're MOST LIKELY to blow off work because they'd rather muck around on social media or play games or do anything that isn't a problem set. Yet putting them in college raises the stakes to a point where blowing stuff off can be more serious than blowing stuff off in high school. As in: goodbye scholarship, goodbye top-tier grad school, hello student loan debt.
IMO, radical acceleration is a very, very dangerous game. Some people can sail through college in their teens without problems, but I suspect that they're a minority. A single class is one thing, but a full schedule can be demanding in the extreme, and I don't mean just intellectually. Personally, if my kid couldn't even handle doing some Google searches or reading up on the basics on one of the numerous websites that have this kind of information, I wouldn't even consider throwing him into a full-time college program.
