Meagan McGovern home-schools all three of her children, including her 18-year-old son who plans to attend college next year.
She confesses that the college application process can be challenging for home schooling parents to navigate, but not impossible.
“It’s not hard, but it’s tedious and time-consuming and very detailed, and if you miss a step — your kid might not get in that year,” says McGovern, who lives in Ferndale, Washington, and is in the process of writing e-books on how to get home-schooled kids into college.
Her eldest son, Sawyer Stone, is taking a gap year before college to travel. He received acceptance offers from Bates College in Maine, Grinnell College in Iowa and several from Washington state schools.
He is leaning toward attending Grinnell — a small National Liberal Arts College, adds McGovern, who plans to continue home schooling her two younger children, ages 8 and 13, because she says it’s a better option than public K-12 schools.
As of 2016, around 3 percent of U.S. children ages 5 through 17 — roughly 1.7 million students — were home-schooled, according the latest data gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the U.S. Department of Education.
According to the National Home Education Research Institute, home schooling is growing in the U.S., although the number of children schooled at home is roughly the same as in 2012. While the figures over time look flat, the Oregon-based organization says the total number of school-aged children in the U.S. has declined in recent years.
School safety was listed in the NCES report as an important reason for home schooling, along with dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools and the desire to provide moral instruction.
[Read: Why Enrollment is Rising at Large Christian Colleges.]
Kristen Moon, founder of Atlanta-based Moon Prep, a college admissions consulting firm, says she’s seen a rise in the number of home-schooled students since she moved to Georgia nearly 10 years ago. “This is largely due to the lack of good public schools,” she says. “The price for private schools in my area is often $25K-plus. Therefore, many parents have taken the home schooling route.”
This sentiment is echoed by McGovern, who runs the Facebook group Homeschoolers of Whatcom County in Washington. “[Parents] believe they can do a better education cheaper … They’re basically doing a private education at home, and they’re saving $25,000 a year in tuition per kid,” she says.
While most colleges don’t have a separate application for home-schooled students, they should provide additional information about their academic studies, such as detailing course descriptions as part of their home school transcript, she says. “If a home-schooler wants to go to a selective college, then they need to make sure that the college is looking for someone like them,” she says.
For home schooling parents and students, here are few things to keep in mind when preparing to apply to colleges and universities.
Provide information about academic curriculum. Admissions consultants say colleges want details about the applicant’s home schooling program, the reasons the student opted to home-school and how they structured their studies.
“It’s really important that a home-schooled student shares with us a really detailed account as to how they came to be a home-schooled student and what they’ve done with their time as one,” says Brittney Dorow, assistant dean of admission at Colgate University. “And that’s going to come in a transcript that they have written out, which will detail a trajectory as well as the classes that they’ve taken and give an explanation of what those courses are.”
[Read: What’s a Good SAT Score?]
Admission officers need to understand why a student opted out of a public district or private school, she says.
Bill Leake, a Texas father who home-schooled two children, says his daughter should have mentioned in her college applications that the quality of her local public school district wasn’t high. He thinks failing to mention this may have caused his daughter, who is a National Merit Scholar currently on a full-ride scholarship at the University of Texas–Austin, not to be accepted to some highly selective private institutions she also applied to.
“There are two additional things we perhaps should have taken position-wise — more supplementary materials like videos, or an e-copy of the book she wrote in junior year; and more emphasis on a ‘Why we home-schooled’ narrative,” he wrote in an email.
When it come to providing a home school transcript, Dorow encourages students to be thorough in covering important details about their home schooling experience.
Dorow advises: “I would rather a student provide more information than less, because if they’ve had a great opportunity or covered something really important over their time as a high school student and we don’t get to hear about it, then that’s one less thing that allows them to stand apart.”
Know that test scores matter. College admissions consultants and officers say tests, like SAT Subject Tests, are helpful in the admissions process to gauge whether a student excels in a certain area.
If a student is applying to a school that requires taking the SAT or ACT, the scores are really important, admissions officers say.
Experts say even schools that are test optional usually require home-schooled or international students to submit scores from standardized tests.
“Any student that does more, it’s going to demonstrate more rigor. If we have a student, for example, who is taking one or two [advanced placement courses] in their sophomore year, that is definitely showing us that they’re on track with what a lot of students at public and private schools would be doing,” Dorow says.
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Take courses at community college. Experts advise home-schooled students to take advantage of dual-enrollment courses at local community colleges. Not only do these courses provide college credit and serve as an example of the student pursuing courses with academic rigor, but classes are also a way for home-schoolers to make connections with instructors who can provide college recommendation letters.
“In Washington state, you can go to community college starting in 11th grade and it’s tuition-free,” says McGovern. “So my son ended up graduating from high school with a dual associate’s degree and high school diploma with a 4.0 [GPA] from the honors program. So he has the opportunity to transfer in as a junior wherever he wants to go in state” or apply those credits at private schools, she says.
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How Home Schooling Affects College Admissions originally appeared on usnews.com
