Startling, I know, but Adam Caller, founder of Tutors International, is urging homeschooling parents to plan ahead by calling him.
I’m not for a moment saying that home education is unable to prepare a child for university, or disadvantaging them in any way, far from it. The vast majority of home schooled children that I have met personally have been bright, articulate and knowledgeable, usually with excellent social skills. I would just like to urge home schooling families to plan ahead for the eventuality that their child may want to take exams in preparation for university, sometimes in subjects that the family may not be able teach or explore alone. When the fact that the child may never have been tested formally in their life is added to the mix, the family can suddenly feel out of depth and that’s when they tend to call us.
Bright, articulate, knowledgeable…sure. But how ever will they be able to express that if they haven’t been 
filling in bubbles for the last twelve years? I print off old copies of other states’ tests just for the fun of it. Never thought of that as college prep, but what do I know?
Ok, so it is a press release. What can I expect? But it reminds me how much marketers play on our insecurities to try to sell us their products. Nothing against tutors, or business, or even marketing.
But I still cannot help but wonder how much the very existence of the “homeschool market” has changed homeschooling.
homeschool homeschooling homeschool market home education tutor
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Since I’ve been homeschooling now for over eighteen years, I can tell you how homeschooling has changed. Some of it for the better but not all of it. There are too many choices out there and parents wanting to keep up with the jone’s or trying to give their children the ‘perfect’ curriculum, are forever switching to the next ‘best’. Please don’t believe everything you read and if something is working don’t switch it and if something is not then please do look for something else. But try to be discerning when buying curriculum it will save you time and money.
There is no perfect curriculum and many times it is trial and error. The other thing that bothers me now? The superiority of some homeschooling parents that make non-homeschooling parents feel like they aren’t good parents. After all we want the choice to educate as we see fit, shouldn’t they? Yes, I know all about how we as homeschooler’s can/are persecuted at times but please let’s not act towards them as they do to us. What is that bible verse about soft words turning away anger? Perhaps we should adopt that behavior.
Can you get a degree in that, JJ?
Thank you for sharing your insights, MichelleRose. I don’t like that attitude among some, either. We should all be passionate about our beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that people who have made other choices are bad or bordering on abusing their own children as I’ve heard some say.
“…sometimes in subjects that the family may not be ABLE TEACH…”
Let’s not dismiss the idea of looking past high school out of hand. I am a volunteer admissions rep for the Naval Academy and every year I meet bright, interested students who are not qualified because they set themselves on a certain track in 9th or 10th grade that is too hard to recover from. Or I meet students who never took the PSAT (with its scores that can qualify a student for big scholarship money) or have put off the SAT (which like it or not, is a factor in many admissions).
This is a factor with public, private and homeschooled students. One difference is that students in a school generally have access to a guidance counselor and are alerted to deadlines, college fairs and recruiter visits. This may or may not happen with homeschoolers.
I’m not arguing that we need to have a professional help us prep out kids for college admissions. But there is a happy medium between hiring someone to get your kid into the right school and not thinking about college at all until after high school graduation.
Sebastian, I’m not at all saying that a student shouldn’t be looking toward college, or be concerned about this testing. I just tire of people telling me I need to hire them for these sorts of things. I think parents have the ability to judge whether they need outside assistance, but this type of marketing seems to tell parents they can’t do it without them.
Where there’s a market to target, there’s a buck to be made.
Dana,
Well, I agree with you totally there. This is part of a trend of professionalizing the college applications process. There are more and more families who are hiring someone to help their child navigate and prepare for college admissions. There are all kinds of issues with this (egalitarianism, originality of student essays, accuracy of the glimpse of the student that the college gets, etc).
But like anything, there are plenty of ways to rip off families in this too. Like the scholarship search companies that don’t provide anything that a day in the library wouldn’t garner. Most of marketing is about telling the consumer that they aren’t complete without the proffered product. Have you ever read “Why We Buy” by Paco Underhill? I think you’d enjoy it.
LOL!
MichelleRose.
Amen to that! I have been homeschooling for almost as long as you and the choices…wow!
I support everyones right to homeschool using any method they chose. But I think it can be way too much.
I do feel this is a HUGE scam though. I can easily find deadlines, rules and regulations.
How? I know how to use a phone. lol My oldest is 16 and has started college. People should give me a little credit on being able to get her into college.
I also had to laugh! I had a picture of a poor homeschooling child sitting in a desk with the test in front of him/her. He/she is totaly baffled with the instructions to “fill in the circle of the correct answer”
LOL I had never given my 16yo a test before and she was able to figure it out….I know…amazing!
michelle
ps forgive the spelling. I have a killer headache.
I suspect we’ll see more and more college admission consultants targeting the HS market as the popularity of HS continues to grow. Currently, 1% or less of the applicants to elite colleges are HS so they already “stand out” from the crowd. But by the time my kids will be applying to colleges, there will likely be a much higher number of HS applicants. The stiffer competition will presumably drive the demand for the types of “hired guns” that are now standard for traditionally-schooled applicants in many areas.
Sebastian, I LOVE Paco Underhill’s Science of Shopping! Along the same lines, check out Emotional Design by Donald Norman and the new Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink. Cognitive psychology explains much more than formal “education” about why we think, buy, vote, worship,parent, love, live and die as we do.
Which suggests at least two thoughts:
1. Education should include becoming aware of, and learning to understand and cope with, our own sub-rational operating mechanisms;
2. Family decisions including higher education choices, have to be made within the same sub-rational cognitive contexts as buying and eating. It’s only human! So intelligent parents need to self-educate before making educational decisions for their children.
We blogged college admission-relevant cognitive psychology “When Getting IN is Hard to Do” — includes concepts like behavioral contagion and social contagion.
A homeschool marketing demographic…hmmm…I guess it was just a matter of time. In the past we were always those “crazy people” who were “denying [our] children a proper education.” Now that companies realize we take this seriously and actually invest in our kids’ education we are a cash cow and they can play to what they perceive to be our fears in order to seperate us from our hard-earned cash.
It’s sick really.
One day we may well see ads promoting programs to help the non-homeschooled youth get into college…
“How to beat those pesky homeschoolers at their own game. You too can have a portfolio!”
I may get in on the action early and make my fortune selling portfolio builders to p.s. kids! Hey! If you can’t beat’em, join’em.
I started a comment, but as is my pattern it turned into it’s own blog post. Thanks for the interesting dialogue, Dana!
We are a billion dollar market. What intrigues me is how much of that is passed from one homeschooling family to another. We are like our own sub-economy.