Pharyngula has a nice discussion of report looking at the impact of high school math and science classes on performance in university science courses. The short version? Definitely take math, as that improves performance in all the sciences in the study (biology, chemistry, and physics). Taking science in high school tends to help performance in that science in college, but doesn’t help much in the other sciences.
They don’t say anything about computing (but, sadly, most high schools don’t offer much in the way of meaningful computer science courses), but my experience suggests that much the same is true there: A solid math background is a definite win. Have some programming experience can help, but it can also get in the way if you end up needing to unlearn a lot. And any advantage one has from prior programming experience tends to wash out within the first yer (sometimes the first semester), while some solid math background continues to be an advantage all through the major.
The error bars are pretty huge, which isn’t entirely surprising given the variable quality of both instructor and student (both in high school and university). It would be interesting to better understand what role the quality of the high school instruction plays in the correlations. Does, for example, a bad science class actually have the potential to hurt you later on?
No tag for this post.