Homeschooled kids going to Ivy League schools?

<p>Two schools that do require homeschoolers to take additional SAT Subject Tests are Columbia and Bowdoin. In our experience, most schools don’t have any additional requirements. There is a Common App homeschooling supplement, but it’s kinda silly–pretty much redundant of stuff you’d put on a homeschooling transcript anyway.</p>

<p>Both of our daughters were homeschooled but in our case that meant they took some pre-IB AND IB classes a la carte at our local public HS as freshmen and sophomores, and primarily took college classes in their last 2 years of HS under a state-sponsored program that allows qualified HS juniors and seniors to take college classes at state expense. That gave them plenty of graded classes for college adcoms to evaluate, along with SAT/ACT and Subject Test scores and some pretty interesting extracurriculars. Both were more inclined toward small LACs than research universities. D1 is a junior at a top 10 LAC, her first choice school where she was admitted ED and is doing extremely well. D2 is awaiting an ED admission decision from another top LAC, her first choice. Our experience is that being homeschooled is no disadvantage in college admissions as long as you’re serious about achieving a high quality secondary education and take advantage of opportunities to pursue it. The only exception to that would be a small handful of outlier colleges like Columbia and Bowdoin that throw up additional roadblocks for homeschoolers, to which our daughters’ response was, “If they’re going to be that unfriendly toward homeschoolers, who needs 'em?”</p>

<p>My homeschooled D is now a frosh at Dartmouth. I believe her homeschooling was an advantage in the application process. On the homeschooling supplement and on the counselor form I was provide a detailed, personalized picture of her education and of her interests.</p>

<p>Seems like a homeschool background would enhance diversity.</p>

<p>FWIW, on another forum someone posted actual statistics from Baylor that showed homeschooled students tend to do better than their ps counterparts. ;)</p>

<p>It has had me wondering what the stats are like at other colleges. I suspect they’re pretty good as more and more colleges are dropping extra hoops they used to require. One still needs to have a great foundation, of course, but it doesn’t matter who provides it as long as it is solid. When one lives in an area where the public schools are par or subpar, homeschooling can give a higher academic student a chance to be all they can be.</p>