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Reprinted with permission from Parent's Guide Press from After Homeschool: Fifteen Homeschoolers Out in the Real World by Tamra Orr N.B. I wrote this very quickly for a book. It needs some major liposuctioning, I know -- I'm working on it. Apologies meanwhile. Hope it's of some use. As a kid, I was a little hazy on things like grade-levels, but I always assumed that I, of course, would go to college. Everyone else did, right? And maybe I wasn’t really in “sixth-grade” as a six-year-old, as I briefly thought until speedily disillusioned, but I certainly wasn’t going to let anyone get ahead of me. College it would be, then. I didn’t really think about the matter seriously, though, until I was almost sixteen. I was still hazy (despite years of repeated explanations) about the whole grade-level thing, but I figured I was probably ready for college. My first thought, as usual when I wanted to find out about something, was to look for a book on the subject. We had a few thousand books knocking around the house, but few on homeschooling. Fortunately, most of them did mention college. What they had to say seemed reassuring, at first. Some of the books said, Sure, homeschoolers can go to college, and left it at that. I wanted something less vague. Others relied on name-tossing: “Why, homeschoolers can go to Harvard,” was a frequent proclamation. Something told me that admission to Harvard was not a guarantee, for homeschoolers or anyone. Still others told would-be inspirational anecdotes. I remember being particularly appalled to read about a young man who finally managed to persuade Cornell to admit him (with a scholarship covering tuition, room, and board, no less); by the age of sixteen, he was, if I recall correctly, a world-renowned expert on birds who had been invited to give a lecture by the National Audobon Society. It seemed a little late for me to take up ornithology. In fact, the more I thought about it, the less it seemed I had to go on and the less it seemed I had to offer. But perhaps, I thought, the answers to my questions about college would be found in books on college, not homeschooling. In those days, I had cards to public libraries in about seven different counties, and I went to the college sections of them all and read everything I could find. There were books on the application process (filled with a bewildering array of acronyms), on interviews, on essay-writing, on test preparation, choosing a college, financial aid, scholarships -- you name it, I read it. There was a great deal of advice about myriad nuances of the whole process, but I sorted out some things as basic. The SAT was basic. The PSAT (once I learned that a scholarship was possible) was basic. Transcripts (I didn’t even know what they were at first) were basic. Teacher recommendations were basic. Apparently, to take tests (at least the PSAT), you had to go through your school. To get a transcript and a teacher recommendation, you had to be in a school. I could read about the relative rankings of the schools in the Ivy League and how to reduce my family’s EFC on the financial aid forms all I wanted; without being in a school, it seemed I would never get far enough for those considerations to take on any reality. However, other homeschoolers had gotten into college somehow. There had to be some way around these obstacles. So I went ahead and compared test prep manuals and read about the importance of a firm handshake at the interview. My mother, meanwhile, crossed the first hurdle for me by calling local Christian schools until she found one willing to let me take the PSAT. The Educational Testing Service, it turned out, actually had a school code for homeschoolers, so clearly taking the SAT was possible as well. It seemed that the only special problems left were those of the transcript and the teacher recommendation. I decided to let them slide for the moment. What was the point of finding a college that would consider me for admission if I didn’t want to go there? So I threw myself into reading guidebooks and ordering catalogues. I also began to read and study literally from morning till night, with only the occasional break -- no summer or weekend vacations, and Christmas-tide my only holiday. This was due more to severe self-doubts than anything. Reading about college’s requirements for non-homeschoolers was disheartening in the extreme -- they wanted so many years of math, so many of science, and so on, and really all I’d done was lounge around reading Victorian novels. I was frantic that I even if I could convince a college to consider me for admission, I’d be rejected because my unstructured education (completely self-taught since age twelve) would be judged worthless. Colleges weren’t exactly falling over themselves to recruit me; quite the contrary. I couldn’t help but feel that I deserved it. Surely they knew what they were doing. Taking the GED (then required in order to be eligible for federal financial aid) helped lay some of those doubts to rest. Quite simply, there is no more egregiously simple-minded test in existence. The test is so easy that (although it is routinely failed by a third of the sample of high-school seniors to whom it’s given every year) many homeschoolers used to take and pass it at the ages of twelve and thirteen. Laws are now in place barring anyone younger than 16 to take the test (17 or 18 in some states). As a Michigan resident, I was able to take the test at 16, but I couldn’t receive my GED certificate until I turned 18. Thus I technically graduated high school a few weeks into my freshman year of college. By fall of my “senior year of high school,” I had a list of colleges I was interested in, satisfactory PSAT, SAT, and GED scores behind me, and a rather long reading list. Now it was time to talk to my colleges and see what they would require me to do to apply. I soon learned I should have done so long before. Every college I called was happy to have a prospective student on their hands—until they learned I was homeschooled. Some were willing to overlook my homeschooling, provided that I took a battery of SAT II subject tests or that my SATs were a hundred or two hundred points above their average (and, in the case of Wofford College, a maturity appreciably greater than that of their average student), or some combination of the above. As it happened, my SATs were a few hundred points above the averages of all these colleges (thanks to The Princeton Review’s book), but that wasn’t the point. Furthermore, most of the colleges wanted some kind of transcript from me. Even those who had dealt with homeschoolers before didn’t seem to understand that a transcript really wasn’t possible. When I told them that I had no records, that I had taken no courses, they were bewildered. Having read little about homeschooling, I wasn’t able to explain to them the difference between homeschooling and unschooling, and it probably wouldn’t have made much difference anyway; as soon as a college found out that I had taught myself -- that all I’d done was read -- they were incredulous or downright hostile. When, for instance, I spoke with the director of admissions at my first-choice college, Grove City, he told me (after hearing that I had a 1370) that many people with high scores on the SAT were stupid and that I would have to submit a detailed “transcript” and various sorts of documentation, along with a letter from someone not involved with education (but still, somehow, knowing all about it) who could attest to my honesty, because “homeschoolers often lie.” (I should add that Grove City now has a different director of admission, and their policy now seems perfectly reasonable.) In short, the whole process was rather painful. I took the college catalogues I’d pored over and threw them away, making sure to rip up and spit on the materials sent me from my erstwhile first-choice. My list of colleges had dwindled to nothing, with one notable exception: Hillsdale College, which never failed to treat me with courtesy. When I spoke with the director of admissions, he not only spelled out what I would have to do to apply (write a description of my studies in lieu of a transcript and have a parent write the teacher recommendation), he talked with me about college homeschool admissions policies in general and how they compared to Hillsdale’s (badly), revealing both his eagerness to attract a homeschooler and his knowledge of the subject. That conversation -- the man’s obvious striving to put me at my ease as much as anything -- put the heart back in me. Unfortunately, on reflection, I realized that the year I’d planned on going to college had arrived, and I had only one place to apply to, and no guarantee of admission. Even worse, Hillsdale refuses to participate in federal financial aid programs, believing such aid opens the college up to federal control, and my family could afford to pay nothing. I needed all the federal aid I could get, and a scholarship on top of that, or I couldn’t go to college. So I began my researches in earnest. I ordered catalogues wildly. I used my father’s computer at work to surf the web. I re-evaluated my criteria. I had earlier bypassed all women’s colleges, fearing that they would be bastions either of raging faminazism or southern-belleism, but at this point I was desperate. I began to read about single-sex education, and found it had a lot going for it—study after study showed that graduates of women’s colleges were more likely to get advanced degrees, more likely to be successful in general, even more likely to marry. I wasn’t sure if all that was really true, but clearly these women’s colleges must believe it; the smart money-move would be to go coed, but these colleges refused to do so. Surely they must understand what it was to take an unconventional educational path for the sake of principles. Such turned out to be the case. I called every women’s college within a 800 or so mile radius of my home, and almost without exception I met with friendly, even welcoming responses. Mary Baldwin College actually called back to offer me an $8,500 scholarship. I thought that there must be some mistake and pointed out to the woman on the phone that I had no grades, no transcript, just SATs. “Oh, that’s fine,” she said. “And, just so you know, we’ll put it in writing” (a promise she kept). Chestnut Hill College, too, offered me a scholarship of $10,000, again, even before applying. The director of admissions at Rosemont College told me in the course of our phone conversation, “I want you to apply.” She offered to waive the admissions fee (an offer she honoured) and to pay $100 of my travel expenses for me to come visit the campus (I declined—her attitude was enough to convince me I liked the place). Things began to fall into place. Surfing the web one day I found the site of Thomas Aquinas College, a small coed college with a Great Books curriculum, which contained an explicit welcome of homeschoolers. I discovered that colleges with similarly unconventional curriculums such as Thomas More and St. John’s were also willing to consider my application on a par with anyone. I began to look for colleges that were unusual in any way—Richmond University in London, for instance. The young man in charge of U.S. recruitment that I spoke with seemed to have no idea what I was talking about, but nevertheless encouraged me to apply. An international perspective, it appeared, made GPAs and SATs seem a lot less like absolute measures of worth and lot more like the relative standards of comparison that they are. In short, I had plenty of options, at last. I applied to Hillsdale, Mary Baldwin, Chestnut Hill, and Rosemont, and was accepted to each. All required simply that I write up a description of my studies in lieu of a transcript; Hillsdale, as mentioned above, counted a recommendation from my mother as a teacher recommendation, and the others simply asked for recommendations from people who knew me (I chose people I’d babysat for). A few short months later, I was a member of the class of 2002 at Rosemont College, which not only accepted me, but offered me their highest scholarship, the Cornelian, worth full tuition, despite the fact that I clearly didn’t have the 3.7 GPA that was ordinarily one of the requirements. The financial aid package they offered on top of that was generous as well, and a woman from the financial aid office called to let me know that my room and board as well as tuition were covered and that the FedEx package confirming that was on its way, just so I would have a day’s less worry. My next four years at Rosemont lived up to the promise of those initial encounters. I loved college. Some homeschoolers and particularly unschoolers are deeply suspicious of the whole concept of college, but I saw nothing to carp at. I had a good deal of freedom in choosing courses -- a feature not prominent in elementary and high schools, and an important qualitative difference. True, I was often made to do things I’d never willingly have done -- read Ovid and Theocritus, for example—they (usually) turned out to be worthwhile. Then again, I was in effect being paid -- via my scholarship -- to read and write. It certainly beat being paid (considerably less) to bag groceries or file paperwork, and without taking this “job” I would have been cut off from every career I ever seriously considered -- nurse (VERY briefly), librarian, professor. I soon found, too, that I still had plenty of time for my own activities -- not as much, but enough. Sophomore year found me teaching myself HTML. My first web site, devoted to old radio shows such as The Shadow, was so fascinating to make and looked so “real” that I cast about for ideas for a second site. I saw no point in cluttering the web with yet another Beatles fan page, so I would have to come up with something original, something about which I could speak with authority. Homeschooling and college, of course. My first concern was to do some research and see if this kind of information didn’t already exist. I quickly found that in just a few years things had indeed changed. The GED, for instance, was no longer a requirement for federal financial aid. The list of colleges that have accepted homeschoolers on the “School is Dead—Learn in Freedom” site seemed to contain nearly every college in the country. There were even sites and books and sections of books, I now found, devoted specifically to giving advice to homeschoolers and (if not more so) to their parents on exactly how to apply to colleges. However, all this advice was geared towards more structured homeschoolers, as was clear from the detailed advice many authors gave on how to craft a transcript. A relaxed homeschooler such as I had been would have both a practical and an ethical dilemma in crafting such a “transcript.” Nor did any of these sources provide me with what I had found to be the most crucial information: what does this college or that, specifically, require of homeschoolers? Of course, a homeschooler could just ask. But to make inquiries of many colleges systematically would take a great deal of time, and to only make inquiries of colleges the student was already interested might be to miss out on some terrific place. After all, how a college treats homeschoolers says a great deal about how they view education in general, and how comfortable the student would be there. So I determined to go ahead and make a site that would, I hoped, function as the Peterson’s for homeschoolers. I wrote up an email asking a few questions (What do you do about transcripts? Teacher recommendations? Do you change anything else about the admissions process and/or hold homeschoolers to higher standards?) and shot it off, at various times throughout the rest of my college career, to the majority of colleges in the country. Fewer than half, I’d say, responded. Those who did often made it clear, by assuming I was a prospective student, that they hadn’t so much as read my first sentence. A number of replies were downright cavalier, not to mention poorly punctuated (if at all) and ungrammatical. My favourite, though, was the college that had tossed my email around from one member of the admissions office to another. I did eventually receive a reply, but in scrolling down I saw how many tries it had taken for someone to come up with an answer and the bewilderment my questions had caused. It was then that I finally realized I’d had no cause to worry myself sick when I was looking at colleges; it was the places that knew the least that were the harshest. I was even more interested to compare the replies I received from the colleges (who usually, as I’ve said, thought I was a prospective student) with their responses to the HSLDA survey on college admission policies and the occasional online list of homeschool-friendly colleges. Responses to surveys that would be posted on the web and generate free publicity elicited often quite different responses than casual replies to a real “student.” Indeed, the perceived casualness of the whole endeavor sometimes led to luxuriant opinion-mouthing. The dean at Kalamazoo College was one such (not that I was surprised, having grown up in Kalamazoo); when I wrote back asking if I could post his reply verbatim, he sent back instructions on which sections I could use. However, what he had in fact done was not so much remove sections as re-write the email, eliminating the many dismissive or negative remarks he’d made about homeschoolers. Ironically, this time around he included my all-time favourite response: in listing things about K-College that might make homeschoolers a bad fit, he cited “an honor code that is open to interpretation.” Indeed. Nonetheless, American colleges and universities compared very favourably to colleges in Canada and the U.K. Very little information is available to homeschoolers in those countries—not surprisingly, as homeschooling is relatively new there and the U.K.’s Ofsted (Office of Standards in Education) makes unconventional educational routes exceedingly difficult. Some colleges I emailed literally had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned home education (as they call it in the U.K.). Now they know. In fact, as much as this site serves to provide basic information otherwise unavailable (and to act as a sort of check-and-balance to other sources of information), it also helps to inform the colleges on the other end of the process and occasionally even inspire change. For instance, the admissions staff at my alma mater, Rosemont, was thrown into a dither one day when they received a call from a prospective homeschooler—the first such inquiry since my call years before. The admissions office called the president of the college for instructions, and the president turned to the webmanager, who was working on her computer, and asked for advice. The webmanager, it so happens, is a fellow alumna and one of my best friends, and has had to listen to me pontificate on the subject more than once. She was able to show my site to the president, who passed it on to admissions and so to the girl. The girl enrolled. Not only that, but admissions decided that for future it would be best to have a counselor who specialized in dealing with homeschoolers. When, therefore, I emailed the president my senior year suggesting that someone write an official homeschool admissions policy, I met with a swift and enthusiastic response, and the homeschool counselor and I did in fact sit down and write such a policy. Furthermore, I was asked for and gave a number of suggestions on how best to actively recruit homeschoolers, and many of those suggestions are currently being implemented. Nor is Rosemont alone. More and more colleges are writing homeschool admissions policies, and a few are actively recruiting homeschoolers. The legal changes mentioned earlier are beginning to find their complement in a change in colleges’ attitudes. Because the situation is in such a state of flux, it’s essential that a homeschooler double-check on a college’s homeschool admissions requirements. Those requirements, if any, change all the time, and then again they may in fact be more (or less) flexible than they appear, depending as much on staff turnover as anything else. It’s usually best to ask to speak with the director of admissions, who has more knowledge and power regarding these issues than anyone (and who can even make up a policy for you on the spot, if need be); once you explain why you wish to speak with the director rather than a counselor, you will usually be transferred quickly. In general colleges that are unusual or outstanding in some way are much more likely to welcome homeschoolers and particularly unschoolers. Ivy League and similar-calibre colleges; colleges with unusual curricula; women’s colleges; very religious colleges; very liberal colleges; colleges that don’t require SATs or that don’t give out grades to their students (such Evergreen State College)—these are all good general places to start ....