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Admissions panels say the students are better prepared

May 14 — Darcy Abrams was prepared to explain to colleges why she had never spent a day inside a traditional classroom. Why her mother had been her primary teacher since kindergarten. But when Darcy, 17, and her parents started going to college fairs last year they were met with a warm reception from recruiters.

 “THEY ALL SAID, ‘Oh, we like home-schoolers,’” said Carla Abrams, Darcy’s mother.

College admission officers, once suspicious of the home-schooling movement, are finding that home-schooled students not only are college-ready, but they’re also more ready than their public school counterparts.

Studies show that students taught at home consistently score higher than the national average on the Scholastic Assessment Test and the ACT Assessment. Once they make the transition to college, other studies show, home-schoolers also tend to have higher grade averages than other students, often because they are more motivated and curious and take responsibility for their own education.

Already, 200,000 home-schooled students are enrolled in colleges across the county, and 1 million more are expected to apply over the next decade, according to home-schooling groups. In response, many colleges have begun changing their admission policies to make it easier for home-schoolers to apply.

“We are very encouraged. ... They are opening their doors. They are smoothing the path for home-schoolers,” said Chris Klicka, senior counsel for the Virginia-based Home Schooling Legal Defense Association.

DARCY’S STORY
But Darcy Abrams said she couldn’t be more well-rounded.

Her family belongs to the Christian-based North Jersey Home Schoolers Association. She said she feels as ready for college as any student from any public high school. She has acted in plays with her home-school support group and has done three- to six-month apprenticeships in several professions, including physical therapy, communications and speech therapy.

Darcy, one of four children, was set to enter kindergarten when the West Milford, N.J., family opted for home-schooling. Darcy’s mother, who was concerned about sex, drugs, violence and what she believed to be the anti-Christian aspects of the school system, was receptive when her husband told her about a home-schooling lecture he had just attended.

“He said, ‘You know, we don’t have to send our daughter to kindergarten next year,’” Carla Abrams said.

When Darcy’s needs surpassed her parents’ academic knowledge, she turned to the Internet, taking online versions of advanced-placement high school psychology and literature.

Darcy was accepted this spring at Geneva College, a small private school in Pennsylvania, where she plans to study speech therapy under a partial scholarship. She said she doesn’t regret her home-based education.

“There is always something inside you where you wonder what it would be like to go to school — what it’s like to walk down the hall and hear the lockers slam and hear the people,” she said. “But I’m not nervous about that I was home-schooled at all. If anything, it helped me.”

A survey of more than 500 colleges conducted by the Home School Legal Defense Association earlier this year found that nearly 70 percent, including Harvard University and other Ivy League schools, had “positive” admissions policies that did not penalize home-schooled students for not having traditional high school diplomas. The other 30 percent still require those students to earn general equivalency diplomas or to take extra SAT subject tests or other exams.

The results of the study were a significant improvement over a 1996 survey that found that 40 percent of colleges were deemed to welcome home-schooled students.

Home-schooling groups attribute the more flexible admissions requirements to both the growing number of home-schooled students and a 1998 change in federal law that opened up college financial aid to home-schooled students without a GED or a traditional high school diploma.
       
JESSICA’S STORY
Jessica Remaly, 17, a home-schooled high school junior from Glen Gardner, N.J., said books and letters from colleges have been stuffing her mailbox since she took the SAT earlier this year.

“I found that many, many colleges are very, very accepting to home-schoolers,” she said. Remaly’s parents took her out of the North Voorhees school system in the fourth grade to teach her at home with her younger brother and sister.

In addition to her work at home, she takes private French and clarinet lessons and has taken up fencing. Like most home-schoolers, Jessica said, she socializes mostly with other home-schooled students.

Jessica said she plans to apply next year to Moody Bible Institute, a small nondenominational college in Chicago. This summer, she will take a chemistry class at Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey to help her get acclimated to classroom learning.

“It’s one thing that a lot of home-schoolers have recommended to me,” Jessica said.

As a group, the new generation of home-schoolers is difficult to characterize, said Karen Prince, an assistant professor of education at the College of New Jersey who studies the movement.

“There are really two loose groups,” Prince said. “There are those who home-school for religious or moral reasons. Those people tend to replicate school at home. Then there are people on the other end of the spectrum who refer to themselves as ‘unschoolers.’”

The “unschoolers” believe in less structured forms of education that let students learn at their own pace and pursue their own interest, Prince said.

It seems the unifying interest for all home-schooling groups is college.

It’s always a concern and we’re always thinking about the future,” said Nancy Hoffman of Morris County Christian Home Educators in New Jersey. Her fifth-grade son already has college on his mind.

“If you ask him, he’ll say he’ll be home-schooled until he goes to Princeton,” she said.  

By Kelly Heyboer
Newhouse News Service © 2000 Newhouse News Service