Athabasca University has an open admissions policy – no formal schooling or credential is required to apply. The admissions page states that applicants should be 16 years of age, but student may apply even earlier with parental permission. For that reason, it is a great choice for homeschoolers, and many may wish to consider Athabasca instead of following a homeschool high school education/program through to completion.

You’ll have to do some work on the University of Lethbridge website to find their policy on homeschool admissions. First, navigate to their main high school applicant page. Once there, in the bottom left of the screen you’ll find a search box where you can ask a question. Just type in the word homeschool and click ask, and you’ll be directed to the following information:

Q: Admissions: What are the admissions requirements for home-schooled students?
A: Admission requirements for home-schooled students include proof of recognized secondary credentials, or some other means of satisfying the requirements of a U of L admission route.

For more information on this route of admission, contact Recruitment and Student Life

Unfortunately, this information does not appear to reside on its own, directly accessible page. (And yes, you’ll notice some meta data in the code where the answer is provided.) So while it’s not the greatest set up, the information can be found.

The University of Calgary does not have any homeschoool admissions information in the usual places, but if you navigate into the school calendar (published annually and includes all university policies, courses, degree requirements etc.) then you will find there is a short blurb about homeschool applicants in section A-13. Usually these sections remain consistent year after year, so when in doubt, look for section A in the university calendar (often found from the Registrar’s website) and probably subsection 13 (give or take) will be the homeschooling admissions policy.  The curent calendar reads:

University of Calgary Calendar 2010-2011 Undergraduate Admissions A.13 Home Schooled Applicants
A.13 Home Schooled Applicants

Home schooled applicants can qualify for admission by presenting provincial (diploma) examination results in appropriate subjects (Alberta or British Columbia) or by satisfying the requirements given under College Entrance Examinations. Applicants must normally possess a high school diploma and present acceptable scores and average on the five appropriate SAT tests.

Similarly, the University of Alberta will require you to do some digging to find the appropriate information for homeschoolers. In fact, I can’t find any mention of homeschoolers on their website at all.  Again, going through the official school calendar from the Registrar’s website gives us at least something to go on.  The calendar states that the university recognizes three categories of applicants: matriculated applicants from high school, matriculated applicants transferring from another post-secondary institution and non-matriculated applicants.  Of these three categories, homeschoolers fall into the third:

14.3 Nonmatriculated Applicants

The University of Alberta gives special consideration to nonmatriculated applicants for admission to some undergraduate programs. To be considered for admission as a nonmatriculated applicant, a student must be 21 years of age or older by the first day of classes of the term in which admission is sought. Specific Faculty requirements for those Faculties that do consider nonmatriculated applicants for admission are outlined in §15.

Nonmatriculated applicants must normally complete specific Alberta Grade 12 courses (or equivalents) appropriate to each Faculty with a grade of at least 50% in each required course and a minimum overall average of 70%. There is a limit on the number of nonmatriculated applicants accepted into each program; there is no guarantee that candidates meeting the minimum criteria will be accepted. Students are considered based on their academic merit and interview results where applicable. Notwithstanding the basis of admission, all students, once admitted, have the same rights, privileges, and responsibilities.

The application deadlines for nonmatriculated applicants are the same as for high school applicants (see §12).

 

For these and other institutions in Alberta, including university colleges, technical institutions, public colleges, bible colleges and apprenticeships, visit the comprehensive listing of institutions and homeschool admissions policies at Education Unlimited.

I learned about Simon’s Rock “early college” even before I was very familiar with Canada’s open universities.  I think that’s why, although I always try to give personalized options and guidance to those who ask for my help, I’m just so keen on using our open universities as a way into Canada’s post-secondary system.

Bard College at Simon’s Rock doesn’t have an “open” admission system: students must apply and convince the admissions department of their suitability for the school.  But, there are no arbitrary admission standards.  You don’t need to write the SAT.  You don’t need a high school diploma.  (In fact, this school mostly accepts Gr. 10 and Gr. 11 students.) You don’t need to meet a certain GPA requirement. There isn’t a particular credential or indicator that all applicants must have.

Admission, for homeschooled and schooled alike, is based on academic information such as transcripts (official or otherwise), standardized test scores (if desired) and writing samples. The application also requests recommendations from anyone involved in the student’s education (home or otherwise), an interview with the student and anything the student wishes to share in support of their application (such as volunteer work, employment experiences, research).

Yes, I like that they’ve created a great example of a flexible admissions policy.  But even more so, I love that it’s specifically created for younger students and that it counters the tendency in today’s education system to hold students hostage in high school until a pre-defined, age-appropriate time for college or university studies.

Is every 16 year old ready for college? No. But, I bet a lot more of them are than we or even they realize.

I didn’t get much out of my partially-earned B.Ed., but one name I was exposed to was Lev Vygotsky. Although Vygotsky himself never used the current educational buzzword “scaffolding”, his concept of the zone of proximal development (the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help) informed the practice of instructional scaffolding: carefully constructed learning supports that are gradually removed when no longer needed.

With some thoughtful (as in, provided with thought) additional support, our students are capable of working at a higher level than their current abilities would suggest.  In order to promote academic development we should absolutely be providing challenges just beyond a student’s comfort zone, and it’s OK if a student needs a little help to meet those challenges.

Here’s where my background as a tutor kicks in, because of course, most of my time was spent simultaneously challenging and supporting my students. I’ve had to endure years of criticism that I was “doing the work for my students” or “creating dependencies” upon my services, but that’s simply not the way good tutoring works.  Traditional education models focus on the challenging but not the supporting.  If learning via support mechanisms were truly valued, then student assessments wouldn’t continue to over-emphasize “eyes on your own paper” test results. Yet, it’s often through support (from parents, teachers, mentors, and peers) that students become able to face and meet even greater challenges.

And let’s be clear on some of these nefarious, independence-killing strategies of support that I would employ:

• asking questions when a student is stymied (often as innocuous as: “What do you think you should do next?” or “What do you know how to do that you could do here?” or even just “What are you thinking?”)
• choosing for the student which question to attempt next (whether or not the teacher assigned it), maybe because it reinforces a concept just talked about or because it introduces a new idea or because it although it’s been dressed up to look different, it actually uses the same skill just mastered
• suggesting that a student write the question down in a different way to help with clarity and organization (for example, writing in “landscape” orientation for a certain notorious category of problems where students can never, ever fit one single line of math across the width of a page)

So what does this have to do with early college or open universities?

Kids can handle academic challenges, even really tough ones, if we’re smart about providing a support system.

This support system doesn’t have to be formal.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be anything more or wildly different than you’re already doing in your home education. It just has to be sufficient for the academic challenges at hand.

If simply turning a page sideways is enough to vastly improve one’s success rate in working with trigonometric identities, then we should seriously consider, really, how much (or how little!) it could take to support our 15, 16 and 17 year olds in an early college endeavour through one of Canada’s open universities.

Then, our kids could just be in university instead of worrying about how to get in. Instead of spending their “high school” years with curriculum packages, 12U credits, SAT scores, porfolios and home made transcripts, our kids could just be learning at the university level, receiving their university education and working towards a university degree if they so choose.  Or, they could use their university classes to transfer into a traditional college or university after a year or two and be no further behind than others their own age.

This won’t be everyone’s chosen path.  But, I think it should be one of the options that home educating families evaluate before making their post-secondary plans. What if your child really did decide that he or she wanted to start university right now? There are places, like Simon’s Rock, where this is happening in a formal setting. But you can make it happen right in your own home, whenever you want, without jumping through anyone’s admission hoops.

What if we rephrased our current thinking from, “How will my child get into university?” to “When and how will my child decide to take advantage of the guaranteed, immediate access s/he has to Canada’s post-secondary education system?” (If, of course, he or she chooses to make use of it at all.)

I look forward to discussing this at the Kitchener Waterloo Christian Home Educators’ Conference in a few weeks!

My online storage system has recently allowed for the sharing of files publicly, so I’m testing it out with an electronic copy of the CD that was handed out at the KWCHEA conference earlier this year. You can now download one big zip file at the following link:
Download of KWCHEA CD package

The file will have to be unzipped or decompressed using any standard program. Then you should see 6 folders which all contain a bunch of pdf files:

- Articles Written by Sarah
- Ontario Ministry of Education High School Resources
- Ontario University Admission Policies 2010 (all were updated as of spring 2010 for admission in fall 2010)
- Open Universities (information about Canada’s open universities available to Ontario Students)
- OUAC e-info information on all universities and programs (Ontario institutions)
- Standardized Tests for University Admission (including SAT, AP, CLEP and ACT)

Let me reiterate: this is not leisure reading. It’s boring. It’s not particularly pretty. But, if you are applying to university in Ontario as a homeschooler without a traditional high school diploma, I can’t think of any information you need (before you get to the point of speaking with individual universities) that’s not included here.

I also want to be perfectly clear: everything except the articles written by me is freely available online. I’m not claiming to have authored this material; I only compiled it because frankly, some of it is pretty darn difficult to find on your own. You’d be amazed at some of the navigation paths, file names and various educational jargon that industry professionals think makes sense. There’s some information here that even I had to pull my hair out to find online, so my goal was simply to put it all in one place for those who have neither the time nor the inclination to track down the information for themselves.

As this information is available freely online, there is no copyright infringement by providing it to you. Some of what’s included are simply screen shots from websites, and in that case, it’s enough to provide you the basics of what you need to know, but also provides you with the website address and how to get there yourself to get more information if you need more than the basics. And, since this information is freely available online, I have not sold nor are you allowed to sell the contents of this file. I was not financially compensated from KWCHEA in any way for this project. (They offered to reimburse me for my time, but I insisted that any money they had should go towards creating as many CDs as possible for free distribution.)

By downloading this file, you acknowledge that this file may not be sold and agree not to sell this file. It simply hasn’t been created in such a way to make that legal, as it was never my intent to receive compensation for this work. But, I hope you’ll share it freely.

I believe the contents are extremely accurate, but of course, mistakes happen. Please do let me know either by email or in a comment below if you find an error. Also feel free to let me know how you’re using the information, or if there’s anything I haven’t included that you think would be helpful, and I can consider that for version 2.0.

Depending on your browser, the link above may initiate a download automatically, so be prepared for that. The file is safe to download, but if you experience any problems please do let me know and I’ll take immediate action.

While collecting information on Open Universities (Athabasca University and Thomspon Rivers University) for the upcoming KW Christian Home Educators’ conference, I discovered that the University of Guelph now has an Open Learning Program with “no formal admission requirements.” Their website goes on to say:

Guaranteed Admission to a B.A. Program

English proficiency requirements as outlined in the Undergraduate Calendar apply. Contact Admissions at 519 821-2130 for details.

Open Learning program students with no previous post secondary experience who complete four courses (2.0 credits) with a 70% minimum cumulative average, may qualify to transfer into the Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Commerce Programs at the University of Guelph. Please contact the Office of Open Learning for information regarding these opportunities, since there are different course requirements for each program. Please note: University of Guelph admissions requirements are subject to change at anytime

Way to go, Guelph!

Guelph’s Open Learning Program Website – http://www.open.uoguelph.ca/prospective/open-learning