What is the percentage of Home-Schooled kids "Graduating" from a top-tier college?

Question

How many home schooled kids in general get through a professional degree like a doctor or engineer from a top tier college?

Is the percentage of "graduate professionals" skewed towards those who studied in a public/private school rather than home-schooled?

Answer 1

I have no statistics to back it up, but I would guess that, in general, the distribution would be similar to the school-age public as a whole.

Let's say 1% of kids are homeschooled (that's about right), 10% go to private school (not sure on this one), leaving about 89% in public school. So most likely, the breakdown of top-tier graduates would be similar, or, about 1% from homeschool background, about 10% from private school and about 89% from public school.

I would guess the distribution would definitley be skewed toward public/private schools, as they have such a large percentage of the population in general.

You must also remember that people homeschool for a variety of reasons, one being medical problems of the child, and I would guess a majority of these kids don't go on to college. Also, lots of homeschool kids start businesses before they graduate from high school and may not go on to college because of it.

Homeschooling would only be one factor among many when looking at graduate school graduates - my husband never completed high school, yet holds 2 Master's degrees. More weighted factors in determining graduate school success are socioeconomic status of the family and parental levels of educational attainment.

Answer 2

Since the largest number of kids finishing high school through homeschooling is occurring now, I'm not sure what sort of statistics are out there right now for who's finished and who's still studying. I'm not even sure that statistics as specific as you are looking for are available.

What I have found is that in 2003, HSLDA ran a study and found that over 74% of homeschooled students had taken college-level courses, compared to only 46% of the general population. At that point, .2% of homeschooled students had earned a professional degree, compared to .05% of the general population.

Answer 3

Another thing to take into consideration is that some colleges and universities are actively recruiting homeschool students because they are more likely to finish the courses and actually graduate than some of their public/private schooled counterparts. There are even scholarships available to homeschooled students.

Answer 4

My daughter was homeschooled from the 4th grade on, has gone thru college, is at the university now...will be doing neuro-sciences.......
Homeschooling allows you to intensify your prep work, allows freedom of subject matter, and affords more focus on the future, or at least that is what I see.