The more I learned, the more I saw that the quarterlies function not only as a tally of achievements but also of what's accepted by the school district. Deb has started to show units at the bottom of Silvie's. So at the end of high school, she'll have a stack of papers with earned credits, stamped as received.
In the course of her education, Brooks has been in 15 theater productions, 11 of those through the Shakespearean youth theater, New Genesis Productions, which is how I met her family. Brooks has performed as Hamlet and the Shrew, and was the assistant for my daughter's summer intensive. Brooks believes that it was this dedication that lent credence to her college applications. "Homeschoolers learn to be self-directed and driven," Brooks says. "Our time is more flexible so we can dig deep into subjects of interest. In a way, it's the prelude to college, where you get to really focus on and commit yourself to your passion."
This fall, Brooks will be starting at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where she'll study acting as well as playwriting and directing through their Playwrights Horizons Studio. "I guess I went with the most academic BFA option I could!" she says. She hopes that the choice will prove to be a good fit for her. "The work that I want to do doesn't require any kind of technical degree so, really, I'm getting this education because I want to improve myself, intellectually, before going out into the world."
Standardized Achievement Terror
For all her accomplishments, Brooks notes one place for improvement. "As my homeschooling experience wasn't test based, I felt at a disadvantage compared to others who had a lot of practice," she says. In fact, if she could do it all again, she would have started preparing for college sooner, taking the PSAT at the earliest possible date and choosing two topics for the new SAT subject tests sooner so she could have ample study time.
This is where she and McGuire differ. McGuire wouldn't have taken the SATs at all. "Many colleges don't require them because the scores don't say anything about students," she says. When she started applying to schools, she learned that she didn't need the scores to get into her top choices. "I could have saved myself the stress." Research into each school's individual policy is necessary, though, because the reality is that some schools that don't require scores do mandate that homeschoolers submit them. The thinking is that for students who have few standardizations and evaluations primarily from their mothers, the SATs provide a measure for comparison that can help colleges predict the potential success of applicants. It's a debate that continues.
At What Cost?
During the info session, Alford confided that college costs were a major concern. She's an ex-pat from France and, there, higher education is just the next step—and it's affordable. But she describes her experience at French university as uninspiring. A demanding application process could filter out the slackers, leaving only the curious and driven. But there's still the question of how to pay for it. "If your kids decide that they want to go to college, I would say that money is the key factor in the education equation," Alford says. Marley agrees with her mom. "There seems to be a myth that once a college accepts you, they will provide whatever financial help you need in order to attend," she says. "In actuality, it means massive loans."
The New York Times notes that the average student borrower these days leaves college with $27,000 in debt. "Thinking about it early gives you the immense luxury of looking into the zillions of scholarships out there," Alford notes. She sites the Foundation Center, a scholarship and grant organization, and Gale Cengage Learning, which archives learning resources and makes them accessible through libraries. On Marley's handout, there are two sites, if you simply enjoy applying for scholarships: Zinch.com and ScholarshipPoints.com, with essay challenges and surveys. "Now applying is like a sport for her," Alford says. But she advises looking to scholarships that substantially reduce tuition rather than spending time applying for many small ones.
