Most colleges are bad choices for many students

OPINION:

Roughly 6% of American school-age children — an estimated 3.1 million students — are being homeschooled, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. And no, they’re not “weird,” to use a term we hear frequently these days.

Unknown to most people, homeschooling began in the 1970s as part of the counterculture movement. Homeschooling families were opposed to standard classroom instructional methods, which emphasized rote learning, order and discipline. These parents wanted to “unschool” their children.

Starting in the 1980s, a second wave saw mostly Christian conservatives remove their children from schools out of concerns about content. They opposed the sexualization and politicization of the curriculum; many wanted to incorporate religious teachings into what their children learned.

A third group began homeschooling because their children, such as those on the autism spectrum, had learning or physical disabilities. These parents sought to provide their children with a safer and more caring environment in which to learn to fit in. A fourth group arose as the pandemic took hold and most public schools closed, and parents started seeing what their children were being taught online — and not being taught.

What kind of college is right for homeschoolers? Just as there is no one reason why families homeschool, there is no single, categorical answer to the question. We can’t say what’s right for them, but we can say what’s wrong: the vast majority of today’s colleges and universities.

To understand why, it’s important to unpack what college is. While we tend to focus on education, education is only one part — and for many young people not the most important part — of why they go to college.

The college experience includes at least four elements: (1) education — acquiring knowledge and skills, (2) networking, (3) transitioning from childhood to adulthood and (4) acquiring credentials. Consider each:

Education: Homeschool students have learned to be independent and active in their learning. One of the benefits of homeschooling is that students often learn the same amount of material in as little as half the time as traditional classroom students. Traditional higher education, like traditional public schools, is designed to spoon-feed students. Professors often assume students won’t do their reading, so lectures repeat what’s in the textbooks. It’s boring and redundant and doesn’t meet the learning styles of independent-minded homeschoolers.

Networking: While some occupations are tied to particular colleges — Wall Street and the foreign service recruit largely from Ivy League schools — for most students, the real work of finding a job happens through individual effort, not through college placement services or the “old boy network.”

Social networking is increasingly the same. While much of who we are is defined by the people we interact with in high school and college, most long-term relationships start at work or through friends. While Greek life was once a major source of professional and social relationships, membership in fraternities and sororities has been declining rapidly.

Technology has also radically changed how people network. Therefore, for homeschooled students, college is much less valuable for creating professional and social networks than it was even a few years ago.

Until the 1960s, colleges provided a transitional living environment in which teenagers could prepare for life as adults in a highly controlled way. There was an implicit contract between parents and colleges that behavioral “standards” would be enforced. Dormitories were separated by sex, and women’s dorms were largely off-limits to men. Social activities were supervised, and the college acted in loco parentis — in the place of parents.

Those days are long gone at all but the most conservative, religion-oriented schools. Today, most colleges provide little to no oversight. There is more “loco” — to use Spanish rather than Latin — than parentis. Many are engaged in promoting alternative lifestyles and demanding that students bow to the prejudices of the moment in areas of sexuality, recreational drug use and political activism. For most homeschooling parents, these “values” are the opposite of what homeschooling was designed to protect.

Credentials. A college degree still sends a signal to employers and the world, so there is still a reason for homeschooled students to continue their education. But big factory mega-universities and tony “woke” colleges are not right for most homeschooled teens.

If colleges are going to compete for homeschool students, they need to rethink their approach to these four parts of the college experience and devise a new bundle of services to serve their needs. For institutions that do, homeschool students are a huge opportunity.

• Fred Fransen is president of Huntington Junior College in Huntington, West Virginia, which is introducing a classical liberal arts program designed specifically for the homeschool community.