Posted on 09/30/2006 3:33:01 AM PDT by deaconjim
COLUMBIA, Mo. - Bombarded by choices at a college job fair, Sara Kianmehr quickly found her match: Columbia College, a small, private school that didn't mind that her transcripts came from her parents.
The college "was the only institution that didn't have a puzzled look and say, 'Home school,' and ask me a million questions," the 19-year-old junior said. "There was a big appeal."
With colleges and universities aggressively competing for the best students, a growing number of institutions are actively courting homebound high achievers like Kianmehr, who took community college courses her senior year of high school and hopes to eventually study filmmaking at New York University or another top graduate school.
The courtship can be as subtle as admissions office Web sites geared to home-schooled applicants or, in the case of Columbia College, as direct as purchasing mailing lists and holding special recruiting sessions.
After years of skepticism, even mistrust, many college officials now realize it's in their best interest to seek out home-schoolers, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
"There was a tendency to kind of dismiss home schooling as inherently less rigorous," he said. "The attitude of the admissions profession could have at best been described as skeptical."
Home-schooled students — whose numbers in this country range from an estimated 1.1 million to as high as 2 million — often come to college equipped with the skills necessary to succeed in higher education, said Regina Morin, admissions director of Columbia College.
Such assets include intellectual curiosity, independent study habits and critical thinking skills, she said.
"It's one of the fastest-growing college pools in the nation," she said. "And they tend to be some of the best prepared."
The number of home-schooled graduates enrolled at Columbia College is small — about a dozen out of a full-time undergraduate population that hovers near 1,000. But they count among their supporters an influential advocate.
Terry Smith, a political science professor and the school's dean of academic affairs, home-schooled three of his four children in the 1970s and '80s. Each of those children went on to graduate from college, with two earning master's degrees.
"All of my professional work has been influenced by this family schooling experience," he said. "We're all teachers and learners. They're just the apprentices, and we're the master learners."
The school's admissions standards for home-schooled students are identical to those for traditional graduates — minus the formal transcript requirement. Some colleges and universities, though, continue to require home-schoolers to earn a GED high-school equivalency diploma or take subject-specific SAT tests along with the standard requirements.
At Stanford, sympathetic admissions officers have helped make the university a beacon for high-achieving home-schoolers. The support can be seen on the Stanford admissions office's Web site.
"The central issue for us is the manner in which you have gone about the learning process, not how many hurdles you have jumped," the office advises home-schooled students. "We look for a clear sense of intellectual growth and a quest for knowledge in all of our applicants."
Jon Reider, a former senior associate admissions director at Stanford, said the school's pursuit of home-schoolers fits its academic and social mission.
He also acknowledged that Stanford and other schools now realize that home-school students are a prominent enough population that can only be ignored at a university's own peril.
"Part of it is driven by demographics," said Reider, now a guidance counselor at a private high school in San Francisco. "There's a surplus of college spaces" and attracting good students to them is important everywhere.
Magdalene Pride, a first-year Columbia College student, was a beneficiary of the school's aggressive recruitment of home-schoolers.
After earning more than 50 credit hours through a combination of community college classes near her suburban St. Louis home and online Advanced Placement course, Price was awarded a four-year scholarship to Columbia College that covers the school's $12,414 annual tuition.
Among those who helped sell her on Columbia College was Kianmehr, a student ambassador who spoke at a college fair Pride attended.
"They're so open to home-schoolers here," she said. "No one looks down on me, or treats me different. It's very accepting."
"I'm taking off for an open house at Brown University with my homeschooled son in a few minutes. He will also be applying at Stanford. This article is timely and encouraging! An omen, maybe? LOL! He'd sure love to go to Stanford and he's also a high achiever, so maybe he has a chance!"
Please let us know which outstanding university your son is admitted to. And please consider spreading your home education success story far and wide.
"BTW, one of my home school kids who received her MA this past spring from the University of Cincinnati just went to work for a book publishing company as an editor. Salary is nothing to sneeze at, they wanted her."
That's awesome! Congratulations. I hope you'll consider telling your home education success story to others.
"Homeschooling isn't for everyone, but for my kids it was the only choice."
I think it's a viable choice for far more parents than currently do so. I hope you take the time to spread the good word about home education. Proud, happy parents and their brilliant children are probably the best advertisements out there for home education.
Freudian slip? LOL! I prefer the term "government school." One minor benefit is that you don't make that slip of the keyboard.
We homeschooled 5 kids in Alaska and now we're here in Montana and I have yet to meet a single "weird family". When they were in public school I met plenty of "weird families" and decided we would take control of our childrens education instead of throwing them to the Socialist lions.
Good luck and God bless. My wife and I admire what you have achieved. We hope to emulate it with our 3 and 5-year old children.
More like a fat finger than a freudian slip, but I may have to remember the "government school" advice.
"More like a fat finger than a freudian slip, but I may have to remember the "government school" advice."
Words have power.
The underlying idea of political correctness is to subtly change the name of things for propaganda purposes. So a government school becomes a "public" school. A home defense rifle becomes an "assault" rifle. A lazy do-nothing becomes "challenged."
Just because you don't know any "weird" homeschool families doesn't mean they aren't a large number of them. Where I live, there are a lot of homeschoolers and a fair amount of strange ones. Not necessarily bad strange, just strange :)
My 16 year old daughter freeps here---lurks more than anything really. She does attend public school and is a good student--very good. As as junior, she is currently tied for 1st spot in her class.
She saw this thread, clicked on it, then came to ask me to see your post.
I had to explain to her, in the briefest of terms what "fisting" was--thanks for exposing my child to that term. She'd never heard it from her teachers--she heard it from a freeper. It appears I will have to restrict her access to Free Republic in the future.
In about 50 years, I think that we'll look back and say, "And it all began with a few mostly Christian parents who wanted better for their children, and now it's what any parent worthy of the name parent does," and know that we witnessed it's beginnings.
It has been said that all history takes place in households. We may be witnessing the beginning of something historical. Taken in that context, it makes homeschooling even more purposeful.
Not an Ivy League but still quite prestigious.
Cheers!
That explains why the guy from admissions who spoke to us today spent so much time talking about how safe the campus is, lol! I guess he was being defensive.
Thanks for that bit of info!
You have misunderstood what I was saying. Read my earlier posts, I am a fan of homeschooling. I was homeschooled and plan to homeschool my children in the future.
I hope so. :-) If public school is still with us in 50 years, I hope at the very least that the homeschooling movement will have moved it to change for the better.
Um...don't choose Brown or Stanford. Way too liberal.
I've had several people tell me this here (via private messaging, also) and I thought I'd tell people that I do know that these schools are liberal. But, my kids are well prepared to defend conservative values and they know what liberals think. There will be no surprises for them. They've been immersed in conservative politics since the day they were born. Also, my son is going into either computer science, engineering or bio-chemistry. I have an engineering degree from a large state university and I only ran into the liberal garbage in the few courses I had to take outside of my engineering courses. My main concern about him going to a liberal school is that he might not find a nice conservative girl to marry. :-)
I wish your kids every success and you sound like a wonderful parent.
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