Applying College Well : Tips for Homeschoolers

Buy this book »

Over the last twenty-five years, homeschooling has become an increasingly popular option for the U.S. families. Homeschoolers are very difficult to count, but a recent Department of Education survey estimated that about 1.5 million students are homeschooled in the United States. Families homeschool for many reasons—the most often cited are concerns about school environment, a desire to provide religious or moral instruction, and dissatisfaction with the academic instruction available in other schools (including a wish to provide a more challenging curriculum). If you are a homeschooler or parent, this article will help you prepare for and apply to college.

Despite the proliferation of online college courses and even some graduate programs that can be done entirely online, most homeschoolers still prefer the idea of a real college education. Very few opt for homeschooling beyond high school. Overall, this article is perfectly useful for any homeschooling family. As you approach the college application process, our basic advice is that you should try to emulate the behavior of a regular high school applicant as much as possible. Colleges have become much more receptive to homeschooled applicants than they were even a decade ago. Most colleges now have at least some experience evaluating the credentials of homeschooled students, and some have even developed formal admissions guidelines and policies for homeschoolers. There is excellent, more detailed advice available from some college Web sites (for example, you can search for Home-Schooled Applicant Guidelines at Stanford University, Homeschool Admission Guidelines at Claremont McKenna College, and Homeschool Applicants at Lawrence University) to find suggestions on how to proceed that will fit almost any college.

Similarities and Differences

Everything about self-inquiry, visiting colleges, writing essays, preparing for standardized tests, and deciding on a balanced list of colleges applies to homeschoolers as much as to regular students. On several points, however, the experience of homeschoolers does diverge significantly, and special care needs to be taken.

Grades and Transcripts: Colleges like to see grades, but they only mean something in a comparative context. Even in a regular high school, having all A’s doesn’t mean too much if half the class gets all A’s. Similarly, if you are the only one in the class, and your parents are your teachers and give you all A’s, it is hard for a college admissions officer to make too much of that. Colleges do want you to have taken a broad array of courses in high school, including laboratory science and foreign language. While they may grant you some flexibility because you followed your passion for birds for a year but didn’t take a basic biology course, or read nothing but Greek and Celtic mythology without a regular English class, you can only take this so far. Basically, you have to think about meeting the college halfway. It can help if you have supplemented your homeschooling with some regular courses from a high school, community college, or online, something that allows your record to be evaluated relative to other students in a class.