How can a homeschool student qualify for college scholarships?
We successfully homeschool but don’t know how to obtain scholarships. We know of traditional students who have obtained scholarships for their ACT scores and musical achievements and basketball achievementments. What are available for homeschool students?
February 24th, 2010 at 11:44 am
Home schoolers can qualify with high scores on ACT and/or SAT scores. Also, check within your state for available scholarships, many like Florida have groups that specifically grant scholarships to home schoolers.
Depending on whether or not you live in a home school friendly community, many home educated are allowed to enter into public school sporting activities as well as music and some are able to earn scholarships from those.
Then of course there is the National Merit Scholarship http://www.nationalmerit.org/ and finally, here is a whole slew of choices http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/olderkids/ContestsScholarships.htm
Hope that helps ~
February 24th, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Exactly the same thing. A homeschooled student with have to take ACT/SAT to get into college anyway. If they have done a significant amt. of community service, or play an instrument, or have stellar grades or college credit, all that could count towards a scholarship.
February 24th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Solid advice, there. Also look in to a seminar titled “homeschooling through high school.” Everyone I know that has attended one of these seminars has walked away with tons of info and tons of relief! (I’m planning on attending one this year myself!)
Price is around 40 dollars. Sorry, I don’t have a website for you, you’ll have to google it, or if you belong to a support group, someone may know about it or at least know how to help you find it.
good luck!
February 24th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Check with a college admissions officer or counsellor and ask for information on scholarships. You don’t have to go to a public school to qualify. But you do have to meet criteria. In some cases, the criteria are marks, in other cases skills, such as music, art, in yet other instances, things like volunteer work and community activism qualify. Still others are dedicated to students who were Boy Scouts, or 4H or something of that sort. There is an amazing range of scholarships available. You might even be able to find something using your search engine.
February 24th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
It will be important to have a portfolio of work. Ideally from the past few years, but at least for the past year. Scholarships that are not based on test scores may want to see portfolio work. Most ivy league schools now have a recruiter whose only job is to recruit homeschoolers; I would imagine they are very well versed in the scholarship opportunities for homeschoolers.
Also check with online scholarship clearinghouses, like fastweb.com. It will ask you a rather exhaustive set of questions, but based on your responses fastweb will scour literally millions of scholarship, grant, and loan opportunities to find those that apply to you. There are thousands of scholarships, some worth many thousands of dollars a year, that are based 100% on the quality of an essay. For example, there is an Ayn Rand scholarship that I think is worth $5000. To qualify you have to write an essay on an identified book by Rand; they award scholarships to the top essays. There are many such scholarships; that’s just one that I recall.