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About the Colleges That Admit Homeschoolers FAQ

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Information Sources for the Colleges That Admit Homeschoolers FAQ

This FAQ is my expanded revision of a list first prepared by Dan Endsley of Home Education League of Parents (HELP), listing more than 100 two-year and four-year higher education institutions that have accepted home-schooled children. Dan Endsley's list of colleges that have admitted homeschoolers was based on information from Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), first published in September 1992, and on other sources available to HELP, current to early 1993. Dan Endsley, a friend of mine from the Prodigy computer network and from a meeting in person in New Mexico in May 1993, that year gave me explicit written permission to take on the task of turning his list into an FAQ file, something I was happy to do.

Since 1993 I've posted the ever-growing FAQ dozens of times on various computer networks and have added by now hundreds of new colleges to it, based on my direct contact with college officers and on reports by parents, students, and college officers who saw my FAQ posted on Usenet newsgroups, on BITNET E-mail mailing lists, or on commercial on-line services. There are now more than 940 schools listed here and on the linked pages, with more being added all the time. The Colleges That Admit Homeschoolers FAQ lists more postsecondary institutions, more accurately, than any of the several plagiarized versions of my list posted on various sites on the Web. (Most of the plagiarizing sites have now vanished from the Web, after contacts from me or the Learn in Freedom! site's readers. Let me know if you see a Web site that copies the information here.)

In early 1995 I began a long-term project of reconfirming every entry in the FAQ by multiple, independent, reliable, informed sources. Visits in 1997 to the National College Fair in Minnesota and in Washington, DC, where I spoke to more than 100 college representatives in person, were particularly productive of verifiable information. So were visits to the American Education Exhibition and the American Education Fair events in Taipei, Taiwan in 1999. The National Center for Home Education affiliated with HSLDA has given me its explicit written permission to refer to its latest list of colleges that have accepted home schoolers and add to my FAQ schools the center knows about of which I was not aware. I keep all the primary sources for my research in a data set, to verify copyright infringement and to share data with future legitimate researchers.

To obtain Web addresses of colleges I have relied on college admission officers who told me directly about their colleges' policies, on the books mentioned on this site's Books on College and Financial Aid page, and on the U.S. Universities alphabetical list maintained by the University of Texas at Austin (http://www.utexas.edu/world/univ/alpha/). The Home School Friendly Colleges site of college advertisements serves as a second-source for confirming some colleges that admit homeschoolers.

Scope of the College List in the FAQ

I check the names of colleges I hear about from readers with The College Handbook 2000 (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1999) (ISBN 0-87447-625-9). Through that book and other resources, including on-line searches, I verify the location of colleges and the spelling of the names I hear about from other sources. My editorial policy is to omit unaccredited institutions from this FAQ (except for one "regional candidate" for accreditation listed in the College Handbook). There are at least a dozen unaccredited institutions that admit homeschoolers, a few of which advertise heavily in homeschooling magazines. Why they are unaccredited (it could just be because they are new) is a question you'll have to ask the staff at those institutions. (The former list of colleges kept by HSLDA on its ever-rearranging Web site did include the names of several unaccredited colleges, because of a different editorial policy.) Readers of this FAQ have from time to time noticed errors in the FAQ, mostly errors in naming in which state a school is located, and perhaps there are still corrections just waiting to be made. I appreciate corrections from anyone.

How You Can Help

You can help make this FAQ complete, accurate, and international by sending me E-mail or postal mail about colleges that you know accept homeschoolers, especially those outside the United States. Your suggestions for additions or corrections are welcomed. You can also help the progress of research by urging Web masters of Web pages about homeschooling, education research, or college admission to add links to this page. It would be an incorrect inference to suppose only the schools named so far in the FAQ have offered admission to children who learned at home. Surely many others that have done so are still unknown to me. No one has ever provided written proof to me that any school of higher education refuses admission on a blanket basis to all children who learned without school beforehand.

Thanks to all who have written previously with names of colleges known to have admitted home-schooled children, or who have set up links to this page. A special thank you to Kenneth Danford of Pathfinder Learning Center in Massachusetts, who sent me a copy of his study of university admission of homeschoolers, which was reported on in the November-December 1997 issue of Growing Without Schooling magazine. If you know of any other organizations that track the issue of home-schooled youth applying to postsecondary schools, please let me know. I would be delighted to link to the Web pages of those organizations or otherwise share credit and information with them if they can help me confirm which colleges are admitting homeschoolers.

There are higher education admission officers who see the need for independent, objective research projects on the college experiences of homeschoolers. I strongly encourage the use of this FAQ page to support such research projects and invite admission officers to contact me if they would like to participate in such research. I would be delighted to report the results of such research on this Colleges That Admit Homeschoolers FAQ page, and to list publications resulting from such research in my homeschooling bibliography, whatever the research results happen to be. Sources previously consulted, but eliminated from this revision of this page, include

The Public Ivys: A Guide to America's Best State Colleges and Universities, by Richard Moll (Viking, 1985).: This guide to public colleges and universities that might be regarded as "Ivy League" quality is the oldest, most restrictive in scope, and I think fairly considered the most debatable, of all the sources I consulted for earlier versions of this page. The author is himself a college officer, who has also written a book about the "selective college admissions game," as he terms it.
Cass & Birnbaum's Guide to American Colleges 17th Edition, Julia Cass-Liepmann, editor (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996) (ISBN 0-06-273404-1) (ISSN 1075-3443) xxxvi and [58] and 826 pages.: The Cass guide claims that it originated the idea of rating colleges by selectivity in 1964 in order to answer the basic question many applicants have, "Can I get in?" The measure of selectivity is based mostly on "the percentage of applicants accepted by the college, the ranking of recent freshmen in their high school classes, the average test scores of recent freshman classes," and other data. The Cass guide includes a summary table ("Selectivity Index") near the front of this huge one-volume guide giving selectivity information for most colleges listed.

I earlier referred to another widely available college guide, which listed "200 selective colleges." I recently looked at an updated college guide prepared by the same research group, which has an even broader scope. But I have ceased noting that research group's opinions on which colleges are "competitive" because of the many peculiar rankings, not to mention outright errors in identifying colleges, found in that guide. When a college guide lists a college that has long had an open admission policy as "more competitive" than many of the "200 selective colleges" that appeared in a list compiled by the same research group a few years earlier, it loses credibility with me. Perhaps the research was good, but the proofreading was not, for the recent edition of that guide.

A completely different approach to rating colleges, which I don't find very plausible in its current version but is an important attempt to rate by useful criteria, is that of the Templeton Foundation Honor Roll for Character-Building Colleges.

There has been an on-line response to annual college ratings posted on the soc.college.admissions Usenet newsgroup, which I think is thought-provoking, and may cause you to think twice about some methods of rating colleges. Check the link to see whether or not you agree with the college ratings you read about in magazines.

If you just want a large database of colleges, organized by criteria that you may be interested in, take a look at the United States federal government's IPEDS College Opportunities On-Line site with its database of 9,000 colleges. Another site that is developing a searchable database of colleges, based on characteristics applicants may be interested in, is College Board Online, the Web site of the hundred-year-old consortium of colleges that publishes the The College Handbook 2000 and administers the SAT, CLEP, and AP testing programs.

What Is Next for the Colleges That Admit Homeschoolers FAQ

Plans for revisions of the Colleges That Admit Homeschoolers FAQ include adding information about how to find ways to obtain financial aid for college study, continuing to add http: links to colleges for which I have that information, adding more information about why not to go to college on a separate Web page, and continuing to reconfirm every entry on the list through multiple sources. Certain students and admission officers have offered to mentor homeschooled applicants to their schools, and I am pondering a suitable format for presenting that information here.

[Sources for the Colleges That Admit Homeschoolers FAQ last revision 19 July 2000]

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Karl M. Bunday
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