Preparing Homeschooled Students for Higher Ed
How to Prepare a Homeschooled Student for Campus Life
Regardless of the reasons that a family has for home schooling their children, if these students elect to pursue higher education, at some point they must deal with educators with whom they are not familiar. Although it may seem obvious enough that these students will face a variety of changes, what may not seem obvious is the need to prepare them for the emotional challenges that will arise.
Research demonstrates that on average, homeschooled students can match and often excel beyond their traditionally schooled counterparts in terms of grades (Sorey and Duggan, 2008). However, those first few key months may present homeschoolers with difficulties that could be lessened with the right preparation.
Common Challenges Faced by Homeschool Students
Higher education is a place for expanding knowledge and thinking critically is highly prized. For students unsure of their new terrain in the college classroom, these new expectations may come across as a personal confrontation or even an attack on one’s religion system. This creates three major challenges:
- Challenges to meet educator expectations: Education is meant to transform and empower students. However, for those students who have been homeschooled and thus rarely, if ever, challenged by someone outside of their personal circle of familiarity, it can initially be confusing. Students may struggle to separate perceived feelings of being personally attacked from educator expectations of critical thinking.
- Challenges to meet personal expectations: Homeschooled students may have personal expectations that are unrealistic initially due to limited experience within a larger more impersonal setting.
- Challenges to comfort zone: As students struggle with who they are within their new landscape, they may find it difficult if not impossible to find a comfort zone within the first few weeks even in their own personal living space if they have opted to live in a dorm.
Why Online Courses are Not a Good Option
Distance education may appear to present an opportunity for homeschooled students to transition from the expectations of the homeschool situation to that of higher education, however, for the majority it is not. The reason is that online courses limit the best of what a student may find in a traditional college setting (the camaraderie and personal support of other freshman) while accentuating the most challenging (instructor expectations of critical thinking).
Tips for Preparing a Homeschooled Student
When a homeschooler is ready to begin college, s/he should be encouraged to try traditional on-campus life for at least one semester, but this should be done after the appropriate preparations:
Allow the student to create a sense of belonging. Research reveals that just as younger students need to feel a sense of belonging in their school to thrive, the same is true of young adults entering college for the first time (Pittman and Richmond, 2008).
Encourage students to attend social functions during the first few weeks of college to form friendships. Positive friendships on-campus have been proven to have a major impact on student satisfaction and success during first year. Therefore, encouraging students to make friends on-campus is far more helpful than attempting to strengthen ties between students and the friends they leave behind (Pittman and Richmond, 2008).
Talk to students about the learning opportunities they have ahead of them, and encourage them to see challenges as positive ways to become empowered thinkers.
Three Major Mistakes that Affect School Success
When sending a homeschooled student to college for the first time, parents should avoid the following:
- Suffocating the student with attention: be ready to provide support, but allow the student time to assimilate into his/her own new surroundings. The student should be made to feel that family is ready to help, but only actually come to the student’s aid upon request.
- Presenting college as a place that wants to change the student in negative ways: young adulthood is a time of great change. Parents should present this as a positive thing and encourage the student to talk about these changes.
- Overemphasizing grades at the cost of learning: while good grades are an important indicator of student progress, students for whom grades are the only indicator valued often miss out on real learning and raise their stress levels significantly.
The Benefits of Good College Preparation
Preparing a homeschooled student both academically and emotionally for the transition into college will ensure that s/he has a strong foundation for building years of academic success. It also could help to prevent depression and lonliness at a time when the student is most susceptible.
To learn more:
National Center for Education Statistics
Pittman, L.D. and Richmond, A. "University belonging, friendship quality, and psychological adjustment during the transition to college." The Journal of Experimental Education, 2008, 76(4)7 343-361.
Sorey, K. and Duggan, M. "Homeschoolers entering community college." Journal of College Admission. 2008.
Homeschoolers Need Emotional Prep for Higher Ed
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