<p>Hello,</p>
<p>I'm a home schooled student applying to Drexel, and for the Letters of Recommendation they state:</p>
<p>*Two letters of recommendation are required. At least one must be completed by a high school counselor. *</p>
<p>I do not have an official high school counselor. Do my parents (teachers) meet this criteria? Does anyone know who I can ask about this? I'm a bit lost here, and I'm not finding anything on their website.</p>
<p>For Common App schools, the parent writes the counselor letter. When my son applied, he said he was a homeschooler and they sent me (or sent him to send me) a link to create my own part of his application. Drexel isn’t exclusively a common app school, but they do allow it.</p>
<p>I did all the forms as if I were a counselor at a school, but they absolutely knew I was a homeschool parent. I filled out a homeschool supplement as well as a secondary school supplement. The secondary school supplement involved his transcript that I created, a letter of recommendation that I wrote, and several nonsensical (for us) questions about ranking my son compared to other students. It is expected for the counselor to be a teacher for a homeschooler. I did a few web searches to find out what a transcript or letter of recommendation should look like.</p>
<p>I didn’t see anything special on Drexel’s web site about homeschoolers either. But as always, you can call the school to find out more.</p>
<p>Like GeekMom63, I wrote the counselor letters for my children. If you use the Common Application, you will be asked to give an email address for your school counselor, and you can give the email of the parent who has supervised your homeschool education.</p>
<p>Then you will probably need to get a couple of outside letters, if not from teachers, then from adults who know you well. If you can predict that they will be strong writers, that is a plus.</p>
<p>Calling the admissions office and asking what they like to see from homeschoolers is a good idea, although applicants are expected to read the websites and not ask questions already answered there.</p>
<p>I came across one exception to the parent-as-counselor idea, and that was from the Director of Admissions at Colorado College. She said they do not want a counselor letter from a homeschool parent. They prefer an additional letter of recommendation from a non-parent. So, you see, contacting the admissions office directly can be useful.</p>
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<p>Well, they’re not TOO concerned about that, because my son was admitted to Colorado College EA and offered a small scholarship! 
He only had my letter and two from teachers. My son didn’t call each college and ask what they wanted, because most colleges (unlike Drexel) were pretty clear what they wanted from homeschoolers.</p>
<p>GeekMom63, Colorado College seems like a great place for some homeschoolers, but my son realized their block plan was not for him, and that decided it. He applied elsewhere.</p>
<p>I agree that calling the admissions offices is usually not necessary, since many of them post homeschool admissions policies on their websites now. Still, they expect to hear from students with questions, and if the online information is sketchy, the phone call can clarify policies and procedures.</p>
<p>Thank you for the advice, Quill Pen and GeekMom! I’ll update this post later with what I find out should anyone run across this thread.</p>