Education & Affordable Housing
College students who were home schooled through secondary school are finding themselves for the first time in a crowded classroom being taught by an instructor who does not know them personally.
The Journal of College Admission says that more than 2 million K-12 students were being home schooled during the 2002-2003 school year.
The differences in home education versus that of public education prompt many questions about the effectiveness of home school. How difficult is it for home schooled students to get into higher education, and how do they fare after admission?
The Journal of College Admission reported that first-year grade point averages and test scores of home school and public school graduates do not differ significantly.
Jeff Fuller, assistant director of admissions at the University of Houston, said many previously home schooled students graduate before traditional students because they have the flexibility to enroll in dual credit courses during high school.
“Just from what I’ve seen, most of them are graduating within the four years, and some are even graduating before the four-year period,” Fuller said. “Many of them have the determination that when they come here, they will graduate and go on to professional school of some sort. I would imagine the retention of them is going to be a little higher than our normal retention rate of a traditional freshman coming in right out of high school.”
Jennifer Brzowski, a political science senior at UH who was home schooled from kindergarten to high school, began taking dual credit courses at a local community college during her senior year of high school. She completed her first year of college and graduated high school at the same time.
Brzowski’s parents home school all their children until college, including Brzowski’s three younger siblings.
“My parents did it for different reasons originally,” she said. “It was partly religious because they’re devout Christians, and they wanted to have some element of being able to incorporate that into the education. They felt that we would be better prepared through home schooling than we would through our local public school system.”
Another home school graduate, Judah Johns, is now a biomedical engineering and political science sophomore at UH. He was home schooled for most of his primary and secondary education. His parents, former missionaries in Mexico, are teaching all seven of his brothers and sisters at home.
Home education provided more time and flexibility for his outside interests than public school would have, Johns said. He created a landscaping business with his brothers when he was 11 and worked as a junior accountant in a law firm from 16 to 18.
“It wasn’t so much book learning that prepared me for college,” Johns said. “It was more the real world stuff that I did.”
Home education also allows parents to tailor curricula for their children in a way that public school cannot offer, Brzowski said.
“I feel like I was kind of able to go further than is expected out of a lot of people my age earlier,” Brzowski said. “I think there’s a lot of potential to go even further than that. When you look historically at education, you’ve got people like Elizabeth the Great who are learning Latin and Greek when they’re very young. I think we underestimate the ability of children to learn.
[U]nfortunately, ‘no child left behind’ often means ‘lowest common denominator.’”
Many home education critics contend that the lack of social activity provided by home school prevents students from learning to interact.
“If a student feels that they’re maybe not accepted by their classmates or they’re different, only because they’ve not been in that environment for awhile, that’s definitely going to hinder their learning process if they don’t feel that they can prepare and contribute as much in a classroom as students who have been in a normal classroom environment for all 12 years of their education,” Fuller said.
Socialization is not a problem for many home schoolers, President of the Texas Home School Coalition Tim Lambert said. Johns and Brzowski both participated in group home schooling and extracurricular activities.
“I needed to learn in a family context how to interact, and then I could interact with other kids,” Brzowski said. “It was nice because I wasn’t just interacting with kids. I was interacting with adults, so it was very easy for me to transition into college because I don’t find professors are intimidating.”
Brzowski and Johns are both in the honors program at UH. Brzowski works as a resident advisor and was recognized as an outstanding first year student. She has a 4.7 grade point average, and she plans to go on to study political theory in graduate school.
Johns was accepted by several schools, including Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin and Cornell University, but he chose to attend UH to stay close to home. He earned a 4.0 grade point average his freshman year of college.
A study by Brian Ray, president of National Home Education Research Institute, published in a 2004 edition of the Journal of the National Association for College Admission Counseling compared the lives of more than 12,000 formerly home educated students with the general U.S. population of similar ages. Ray found that more students with a home school background had taken some college courses or already had a baccalaureate.
In 2003, the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 944, which requires colleges and universities to hold graduates of a home school program to the same standards applied to graduates from a public high school program. Previously, state universities could make home school applicants complete special essays or examinations and frequently required them to have significantly higher test scores than other applicants.
A 1996 study of nationwide college admission policies for home schooled students conducted by the National Center for Home Education found that 93 percent of responding colleges accept course descriptions or portfolios in lieu of an accredited diploma or GED.
Admissions officers at Harvard University recommend that home school applicants provide results of the SAT and SAT II exams and a letter of recommendation along with completing an essay and an interview.
An 1180 SAT score out of 1600 possible points and some kind of transcript is required for general admission for home school applicants at UH, Fuller said.
Lambert said parents should begin to prepare students for college entrance exams when they start high-school level work.
“I’ve made it a point over the years not to tell people I was home schooled when I go into a classroom because I don’t want them judging me before they know what I’m actually like,” Brzowski said. I usually pick my spot, keep my mouth shut and do my work. At some point, it’ll come up in conversation, but I hope that my work would speak for [itself].”
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