Homeschool and college expectations

MomOnALaptop
Fri, 17 Jul 2015 11:05:31 +0000

Oh, that’s what I mean, @hs2015mom – sorry if that’s not clear. I didn’t mean specific class names but subjects (or tracks and variations within the subjects.) Particularly the number of years the kid should take.

For instance, when I said “Life Skills Math,” that’s a different track from college prep (in public schools as well), so a kid with only three years of math in their portfolio, including Life Skills (or Business) Math, could theoretically meet the state requirements to graduate – but, because they only had what counts as, say, two years of college prep math plus one year of life skills math (and not four years of college prep math), wouldn’t meet the requirement for college admission even to their own mid-selectivity state university. I think it’s ridiculous that public universities can have different requirements from their own public school systems; kids in low-expectation schools with poor guidance counseling would run into the same problem and could really suffer from it. But so it goes. (Private colleges often seem more flexible, but not always.)

The same can happen with lab science – that’s a good example, because while some homeschoolers might be doing labs every year because they love it, kids uninterested in science might easily do just one lab science in high school. Or languages – a lot of colleges want more than the basic two years.

Homeschoolers are an independent-minded lot, and it’d be easy to create a curriculum that makes sense to the family, builds a kid’s skills in a range of enthusiasm areas, results in a very well-rounded and happy kid, meets the state minimum requirements in some areas and way exceeds it in others – but isn’t quite a match for the colleges that will ultimately be targeted. Particularly if, as in OP’s case, the local homeschoolers are less college-minded and aren’t focusing on those things.