Posted on 12/30/2012 7:00:25 PM PST by King_Corey
It's not that top universities are telling people directly to homeschool their kids. Instead, top schools are using a selection process that gives homeschooled kids a huge advantage. Here's why:
1. Good grades are a commodity, so they don't help in the admissions process. Girls are doing so much better than boys in both standard high school courses and in standardized tests that their good grades and good scores don't get girls into good colleges. It's not enough anymore. White girls especially need a hook.
A hook is, ironically, something you are passionate about and engaged in that is outside of school. Top schools like Harvard and Stanford have always required a hook. Because when you're in a room full of smart people, smart suddenly doesn't matter—interesting is what matters.
So Harvard, for example, makes a pile of all the applicants who have the grades and the scores to get into Harvard, and then they look for what they need: A violinist, a middle-hitter, a coxswain. Then they look for what else might be interesting. A ballerina, a professional actor, a published author, and so on.
It used to be you needed a hook only for the very top two or three schools. But now white girls need a hook for all the top schools.
2. Your kid will be evaluated on the stuff that is NOT school. What this means is that top colleges are devaluing standardized tests. They don't care if you learn the national curriculum. They don't care if you can get an high score on the SAT. These achievements are commodified in the way that learning has been commodified. What really counts now is showing passion, drive, and accomplishment outside of standardized learning.
But now things start to make sense.
In general, a college degree is simply a ticket to play. It doesn't matter what school you went to, unless you go to a very top school, say, top ten. In that case, the vetting process is so tough that it's a huge endorsement to you to have the school on your resume, and there is a great network of students that will help you go through all stages of your career.
It's no coincidence that the only undergraduate degrees that really give you an edge are from the schools that require achievements that school does not provide. You get that special hook outside of school. Not in it.
3. Going to school undermines endeavors that really impress admissions officers. In fact, most of the hooks that get kids into top schoosl are driven by creativity. For example, Conrad Tao got into Columbia without any AP classes or SAT tutors. He just had his piano and a GED. But the blog Marginal Revolution has a great summary of how teachers in school suppress creativity because teachers don't like creative kids.
So the only colleges that are really worth a student's time and money are colleges that don't value time spent in school. This is one of the biggest endorsements of homechooling that I have found
Consider that you would have inoculated them from the Liberal ideas BEFORE sending them off, and sometimes they will need to learn something you can’t teach. Eventually they will have to leave the nest.
A lot of what is encountered in public universities depends on the degree program.
My kids have gone in to the hard sciences/engineering and aside from some of the liberal arts requirements courses (history for example) they really encountered very little in the way of actively anti-Christian thinking.
They also were careful about which *learning communities* they picked to live in in the dorms and that helped a lot.
Still, there is stuff they were exposed to that they didn’t need to experience.
Commuting is the best way to avoid that if it can be done.
How do they handle homeschooler admissions?
“Eventually they will have to leave the nest.”
Good point.
But I must say I have experienced the very subtle programming and only years later, do I recognize fully what was being done. I was pretty well inoculated, but at times I had the need to rethink a bunch of the harmful stuff that was fed to me at that time.
Commuting probably would be one of the best solutions. Cheaper too! :-D
They are way down the list. First are the 10%ers, then football players, then the out of $tate tuition$$$$, and by then there aren’t many slots still open. It was maybe 3 years ago, UT had so many 10%ers that their president went whining to the legistlature that he’d have to shut down Longhorn football if they didn’t change the rule. Hahahaha, as if UT would ever do away with football. Anyway, after all his whining, stomping his feet and hold his breath until he turned blue and millions upon millions of taxpayers’ dollars and valuable legislative time wasted, he got his wish. The legislature gave UT a special deal of Top 8%, never mind that it was originally UT’s fault that caused the 10% ruling to be made for all of Texas’ public universities. Up until a couple years ago, the top 10% could have just written their name on the SAT and they’d still have had to be admitted but now they have to make a half hearted attempt at a score that a community college would raise an eyebrow about.
Which is a sane position. It’s how I got in! :) I knew all I had to do was place in the top 10 and I was golden. Of course, doing a bit better than that didn’t hurt either.
Sure, if your kid is good but not outstanding, that won’t help them too much - but what if they are in the top 1 percent? Then it’s just not going to matter what else they have on their resume.
Have you seen the pursuit of happyness? It’s like the stockbroker said - “be safe, score a hundred”.
The real advantage of homeschooling is not having all the wasted time. 3 months off for summer, plus all the vacation and “snow” days, then throw in the fact that only about 20 minutes of real learning goes on per class and you’re spending less than six months learning anything.
Home school is year round. If you start when your child is young you can gain a minimum of 3 years over government schooled kids. That’s the equivalent of going to college for the last three years of high school. Furthermore, the education is customized and you have bigger breakthroughs even with a child who would nominally be “average” in a government school setting.
Children in this environment have more time to explore other interests, including basic and even advanced skills. If you abandon much of the ‘science’ curriculum of the government school, system which is junk anyway, there’s no reason you couldn’t prepare a child for medical school, train them for a construction trade test like electrical or plumbing licensing, or have them matriculate with computer certificates that give a 17-18 year old an immediately useful and financially beneficial skill the moment they’re “adults”.
Government schooling is retarding. It diminishes potential. Government school teachers are a joke and a menace to a good mind.
Not to rain on your parade, but this article is about getting into college. You think the aforementioned topics are taught any differently in colleges?
This really isn’t quite true. First, it’s Asian kids who are discriminated against most harshly in college application have the toughest competition—against other Asian kids.
Second, SATs and baseline grades from top schools do matter, and rather than degrees from only the top 10 colleges having significant value, there are about 30 colleges for which that is the case. Again, major matters, and for the hard sciences and engineering the traditional environment still holds.
But, home schooling does give kids about a dozen of the best years of their lives back. It tends to foster more independent minded and acting kids who are more interesting, with more interests that they have had the time and freedom to pursue at a high level. It makes them more likely to have mastered a pre-college, if not a college, curriculum before adulthood, which is a big advantage.
These can become advantages for college admissions, and colleges would be crazy not to want them.
All true—very well said.
We call it “amoring up”.
A mature, well grounded young adult is not as likely to fall prey to a commie professor’s attempt to shake their faith.
I have heard numerous accounts of homeschooled college students challenging the liberal assumptions that spew from the instructors’ mouths.
My kids knew what they believed and why they believed it by the time they went into college. We talked through a lot of the issues that we'd hear about and look at what Scripture had to say about it.
They had a few of the liberal commie type profs and knew how to tell them what they wanted to hear without compromising their faith or lying or even saying anything at all. It just sounded good with a few of the hottest buzzwords thrown in.
It's all a words game when writing a paper.
The want students who are “low maintenance” and without a lot of drama in their lives.
Colleges have learned that homeschoolers are more likely to have psychologically healthy living habits and are less of a drain on school personnel.
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Work a lot among homeschoolers. Not sure either one of those statements are true.
I posted this because of an interview with admissions officer from a highly ranked school. At the time his school was recruiting homeschoolers because they arrived on campus with less emotional “baggage” that that the college services had to unpack.
All this is anecdotal. I doubt studies have been done by unbiased sources.
Without hard numbers or evidence to back up this statement, it is mere conjecture at best. Can you provide hard numbers or evidence?
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Politely and respectfully,
wintertime
Chickensoup's reply: Work a lot among homeschoolers. Not sure either one of those statements are true.
Chicken soup you are about to incur the wrath of wintertime. It is going to get nasty and ugly, very fast.
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