I get asked a lot of questions about how to apply to college as a homeschooler. And ninety-five percent of them could easily be cleared up if homeschool parents would take off their parent hat and put on their principal hat. In other words, most difficulties homeschooling parents have with understanding the college application process would disappear if they just started to think of their homeschool as a school, not just as their home.
Blurred Lines
For most homeschooling families, even those with high schoolers, the lines between home and school are indistinguishably blurred. Your family’s schedule, outings, and activities probably all contain some elements that you would consider educational, even though they look and feel like the things other families do. Cooking dinner is life skills or health and nutrition. English class takes place while your child is hanging upside down in his favorite ratty armchair. There’s no walking in a line, raising your hand, or asking for permission to use the bathroom. Everything is home, and everything is school.
This mindset makes for a fantastic educational experience that teaches a child to find the joy in learning and growing by exploring the world around him as part of his everyday routine. However, this approach makes a terrible framework for quantifying that education and presenting it in a way that outsiders — especially colleges — can understand.
Lost in Translation: The Importance of Speaking Colleges’ Language
You may have noticed that many of the metrics colleges use for assessing applicants, from GPA and class rank to the courses offered by the school, do not relate to the homeschool setting. Homeschoolers often eschew institutional markers like grades and test scores. But colleges are used to working with institutional schools. To talk to them, you’re going to need to think like one.
Thinking of your school as an entity separate from yourself, your family, and your home will make understanding what colleges want much easier, and make it easier for colleges to understand you when you describe your student’s educational experiences.
This isn’t as different or as difficult as you might think. Home and school are probably blurred lines in your family, but that doesn’t mean you can’t separate out the parts that are most important to colleges and present them in a framework that makes sense to college admissions. You do not have to change your family culture or your educational philosophies. You do need to be able to mentally separate your parent and counselor roles so you can understand what colleges need and give it to them.
North Carolina makes this easy because in our state, your school is already a legal entity. When your child is seven, you are required to give your school a name and list it with the Division of Non-Public Education. You must keep records and administer standardized tests. Some find these regulations burdensome, but they do have the advantage of establishing our schools as formal legal entities, each with its own roster of students, its own curriculum, and its own policies—even if you’ve never codified them, even if they only exist inside your head. That’s the entity that’s going to communicate with colleges on your student’s behalf. And you are the face of that entity.
Your Title and Your School’s Name
When you have little ones, school names and titles don’t matter so much. But by the time you have a child in high school, it’s time to decide what you will call the legal entity that is your school for the purposes of formal record-keeping.
Here in North Carolina, we are required to name our schools when we open them, so you’ve probably already chosen a name. If you haven’t opened your school, you’ll want to ensure that your school’s name is one your child can feel proud to see on his diploma and to list on his future job applications. Cotton Candyland Unicorn Academy might not make a serious impression. On the other hand, there is no need to feel you must be creative with your school’s name. Jones Academy or even Jones Homeschool is a perfectly fine name. (Note that school names in North Carolina cannot be changed, so choose with the future in mind, even if you have a young child.)
As the leader in charge of your school, you also need a title. Here again, the state makes this easy for us: in North Carolina, the chief school officer is the School Administrator.
The point here is to convey to anyone reviewing your school’s records that your school is established as a formal organization, in accordance with your state’s laws, and that you are the person responsible for overseeing that organization. It is not in any way to cover up the fact that your school is also a homeschool. (Hint: Colleges already know that.)
Defining Your School’s Policies
Just as the legal entity that is your school needs its own name and leadership, it also needs a set of policies that govern its decisions. This requirement can be difficult for homeschoolers to understand. We are used to making decisions on the fly, in accordance with the needs of our students at any given time. We aren’t used to formalizing those decisions.
But if you stop to think about it, most of your decision-making in any area of your life is influenced by a particular set of values or philosophies. Homeschool decisions are no different. You don’t need to change the way you make those decisions, but you do need to think about why you make them, and make them consistently. Three areas tend to be particularly important for homeschoolers to have a well-defined policy:
Assessments and Grading Rubrics. These are the means by which your school will assess your student’s progress and award grades. These need to be determined early in your student’s high school career—preferably at the start of ninth grade—and consistently applied.
Grading Scale. The grading scale is a subset of your grading policy that tells colleges how you translate numerical grades into letter grades, as well as how those grades factor in the GPA. Your grading scale must appear on the student’s transcript and, again, must be applied consistently.
Transfer Policies. Your school’s transfer policies govern how you treat credits that you bring into your school from other providers. As the school of record, you often have the final say over whether and how coursework done elsewhere transfers into your school. The exceptions to this rule are courses taken at other legally recognized schools, including your local public or private school and colleges or universities that offer dual enrollment. If that school will record your student’s credit on its transcript, you need to be very wary of making changes to that course on your transcript. You can, however, convert grades issued by other institutions to your grading scale if they are different.
Schools across the country set these policies for themselves, and there is no standard way of doing these things. Use your best judgment about what makes sense in your case. It is critical to remember that you must be consistent. Thinking through your decisions and knowing why your school does what it does then keeping a record of your school policies, will help you do that.
Doing these things will also help you when it comes time to communicate to colleges about your student and your school. Questions like, “How does your school weight grades?” make much more sense when you see your school as an institution awarding grades and credit and not just you and your child sitting around the kitchen table practicing a concept until it’s mastered.
As I have said: You do not have to change your family culture or your educational philosophies, but that doesn’t mean you can’t separate out the parts that are most important to colleges and present them in a framework that makes sense to college admissions. You can do both! Don’t sacrifice your family’s educational values. Learn to translate them so they make sense to college admission officers. When you can speak the colleges’ language, you can effectively position your unique student and his unique educational experience for success.
Whitney Cranford Crowell knew she’d reached peak homeschooling when she bought a custom nine-foot-by-six-foot bookcase with a matching ladder and still didn’t have room for all the books. She lives in her childhood home outside High Point with her husband of twenty-five years and their fourteen-year-old son. Their daughter is a homeschool graduate and a National Merit Scholar at the University of Alabama. Whitney is the founder of Launchpad Consulting, a career and college coaching firm. She can be reached at whitney@yourguidancecounselor.com.