Family Pupils Are Homing in on College

Harvard Extension Courses Prepare
Home-Schooled Students for College

by Laura Pappano for the Boston Globe
Reprinted from the March 30, 2003 Boston Globe

Aidin Carey, like her peers across the country, hopes a thick envelope will land in her family's Cambridge mailbox this week. Actually, the 18-year-old hopes that several will, from colleges such as Harvard, Barnard, New York University, Smith, and Boston University.

For Carey, home-schooled since she was 2, acceptances are more than an entrance ticket to a college classroom--she's already taken courses and will earn a Harvard Extension School associate's degree (AA) in June--they are evidence her schooling is as rigorous and legitimate as those earning traditional high school diplomas. "There is always this doubt part that I won't get in, that I'm too strange," Carey fretted last week. "But the reactions from colleges have been really positive." [Editor's note: Carey has since been accepted to Harvard University and started her freshman year in September 2003.]

As home-schooling has moved from a fringe to a mainstream educational option, increasing numbers of home-schoolers are negotiating the college admissions process. More colleges today have policies to make sense of home-schoolers' academic experiences--a January 2003 report by the National Association of College Admission Counseling in Alexandria,Virginia, showed 74 percent of colleges surveyed had formal policies to judge home-school credentials, up from 52 percent in 2000.

But in some quarters it remains a challenge for families to explain, and admissions officers to understand, what a home-schooled student has achieved academically. How real is a student's "A" when Mom or Dad is doing the grading? Who decides if a course should count as honors level or even advanced placement?

"Structurally, there is an issue of fairness, objectivity, and independence of judgment," said Barmak Nassirian, Associate Executive Director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers in Washington, DC, which represents more than 2,000 colleges and universities. "Parents are very vested in their children's success and there is some concern that parental desire to see children do well may cloud parental judgment qua teacher."

For serious home-schooling families whose children may have been strikingly self-directed at a young age, the suggestion that parents should go easy smarts. Kit Morrison, who home-schooled daughter Melody, now a sophomore at Newbury College, and son Matthew, an eleventh grader, said she is tougher than any teacher.

But it's tricky to get that message across, said Morrison, of Seekonk.

"The hardest thing is explaining to people that they do have a valid high school education," she said. Morrison prepared Melody for college culinary courses by having her cook her way through a text by a chef at the Culinary Institute of America.

The matter of validation is a source of particular frustration for Martha Cole, of Sutton, who has home-schooled daughter Rachael, 18, since seventh grade. Although Rachael earned mostly As in 19 community college credits and scored well on the SAT, the lack of a high school diploma has kept her from a spot at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where she wants to attend the honors Commonwealth College.

Ruth Green, director of freshman admissions at UMass-Amherst, said the school welcomes home-schoolers, but requires a high school diploma or GED. "That has always been our policy; that has not changed," she said.

Cole believes such policies are outrageous, particularly when students already have performed well in college courses. Aside from test scores and a detailed portfolio of her work, Cole said, it's not right that her daughter has to enroll in a correspondence school or take the GED to get a diploma.

"I was basically going to be buying a diploma, buying legitimization outside the house," said Cole. "The fact is that we are educating our children this way because we have a different set of values and needs that other environments don't offer us. I didn't see the need to spend the money to purchase a seal of approval."

Cole's solution: Rachael is taking a few more community college courses, enabling her to transfer into Commonwealth College as a sophomore.

But the case raises an interesting question, particularly because home-schooling is legally recognized in Massachusetts as an alternative to traditional schooling. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Oregon, said there has been a "very spotty problem," primarily at large and state-run institutions, of gaining acceptance of home-schooling.

"On average, the private universities and the smaller state institutions are generally eager--and some are actively recruiting home-school graduates," he said.

At Harvard, Sean Boyce, undergraduate admissions officer and liaison for nontraditional schooling, said the college accepts home-schooled students at the same rate as those from traditional schools. "In our process, it is treated as another form of education," he said.

Still, Boyce said it is important for home-schoolers, as for traditional students, to demonstrate a rigorous academic course. While home-schoolers may not have traditional transcripts, he said, many take community college courses. And those learning at home must keep detailed records and describe the work they have done.

"We are not looking for parents to be giving grades to their students," he said. "We want to know about the rigor of the academic programs through reading lists, course descriptions, and a sense of how much time and effort they are putting into the academic work . . . making the most out of the opportunities they have."

The job of translating home learning into a neat academic record means home-schooling families create their own transcripts, or pay someone to do it.

Shirley Minster, founder and director of Home Education and Family Services in Gray, Maine, charges $75 to turn years of academic home study into a transcript colleges understand. Minster also consults colleges trying to evaluate home-school applicants. "What I hear from colleges is, ‘Send me all the home-school students you can,'" she said. "These are students who know how to study independently."

A key part of college admissions, even for home-schoolers, are standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT. While some parents philosophically oppose such tests, they are a widely accepted measure of a student's ability to do college-level work.

The need to pin down a home-schooler's ability to a standard that the traditional world understands drives many to use standardized tests long before the teen years. Morrison, for example, gave her children standardized tests each year, and when Melody applied to college, she stapled the scores to the transcript she created.

Nationally, the desire to show that a home-schooler has been studying and not slacking has spurred creation of a home-school national honor society called Eta Sigma Alpha. Joanne Juren, executive director of the Home Education Partnership of Texas, started the honor society in 1999 to recognize her sons' academic achievement. There are now 31 chapters in 18 states, although none in New England.

Aidin Carey's mom, Maureen, who began reading to her daughter on a daily basis at 2 and has never stopped, thinks Carey should take more law and history at Harvard Extension School and earn a bachelor's degree there.

But Carey hopes otherwise.

"She wants to go to college and live in a dorm," Maureen Carey said. "We don't share her goal. But we have done everything to make it work for her."

This article originally appeared in the March 30, 2003 Boston Globe.
Reprinted with permission. © Copyright Globe Newspaper Company.