Customer Reviews

Homeschoolers' College Admissions Handbook: Preparing Your 12- to 18-Year-Old for a Smooth Transition

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All students homeschooled or institutionally educated should read and heed Cafi Cohen's Homeschoolers' College Admissions Handbook. It's fascinating. (Without obvious intent this book makes a strong case for continual lifetime learning.) It is an exceptionally well-annotated reference work. It more than adequately addresses the doubts homeschooling families have about college admission. The "How we (they) did it" excerpts are inspiring. There are real examples of good admission essays. Transcripts are covered. This handbook is as easy and fun to read as the Reader's Digest.

The benefits of this book begin when the pupil can read. Don't wait for the student to ask, "What about College? The sections of the book on "Paper Trails" and "Putting It All Together" are worth more than the cost of the book. All homeschooling families must have this book in their library

I am an actual homeschooling kid in junior high, and of course, I want to make sure I get into a good college. I bought this book thinking that it would help, but it doesn't. A lot of the book isn't even about college - it's about alternatives to college. I also noticed that the author repeated the same information a lot, so the book really isn't as long as it seems. The people in the book who gave comments were generally Christian homeschoolers from southern states, and many of their children didn't even go on to college. If they did, it was generally only to community college. There were very few comments made by representatives of colleges. When they did make comments, they were very brief, and the colleges, like the homeschoolers, seemed to be southern and Christian. This book isn't very helpful at all, in my opinion. I think that most homeschoolers would be better off using different books to plan for college.

I have a 13 year old who will begin 7th grade next year, so I purchased this book in addition to Homeschooling : The Teen Years. This book was a great help to me and I'm sure I will refer to it many times over the next few years.

I had been considered a correspondence school or diploma-granting private school for my son's high school course work when I purchased this book. By reading the material given by parents whose children had attended college, seeing the different transcript types, and learning of various ways to earn college credit, I changed my mind about the correspondence school. I will continue with the current plan and create my son's needed transcripts and portfolio together with him so that he may attend the college of his choice when the time comes.

I especially liked the checklist at the end of the book. I was confused over when my son would need to take the PSAT and SAT and when to actually apply to college and for financial aid. Based on this book, my son will begin his foreign language courses when he begins 7th grade and is planning to look into a local 4-H group in order to build group and leadership skills and possibly earn a scholarship.

I found Cohen's writing to be both comprehensive and easy to follow, but the content of the book was, overall, not very helpful. The clear unschooling/loose schooling bias of the book made it blindingly obvious that those of us who are classical schooling or those who are traditional school-at-home types will simply be far more prepared for college applications and never need to ask half the questions this book attempts to answer. And some of the answers she gives are a bit suspect, like in the section in which parents are advised to dress up their child's interests in "educationese" to workt the system, thus the author advocates (I kid you not) calling hours spent looking at catalogues school under the label "consumer math." Monopoly is mentioend as "math, economics," which is lovely in elementary school, but we're talking about high school here. And (I'm not making this up) SimCity was specifically mentioned as, what was it, social studies???

While the book is thorough and certainly reassuring (if SimCity gets kids into college these days, my boys who have studied formal logic, Koine Greek, etc. will do just fine!) I found it to be lacking. I bought the book as we are entering our last year before high school and my son and I have the philosophy that we should work out the kinks and make our mistakes now before colleges are looking.... but I think I
will be looking for another book on preparing homeschoolers for college as this one really lost credibility with me.

This is a great read for homeschoolers preparing for college. It gives lots of ideas on preparing for college as well as questions whether college is the best solution for your particular child while offering other options if it isn't. Good preparation material for whatever path your child chooses to take.