<p>Does homeschooling through an online high school hurt or help a person's chances when applying to a college such as Harvard, Yale, etc. </p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>Not at all. If you are well prepared, you will do fine. Like all applicants for top schools, you better have a pretty impressive application beyond your school work.</p>
<p>Statistically, I don’t think we know, at least I haven’t seen any studies mentioned here. For all we know, it may actually help!</p>
<p>On a different message board I frequent, homeschoolers have gotten into all levels of college from community college to Ivies, Stanford, and MIT.</p>
<p>I don’t think it hurts - except at a few colleges who are notoriously homeschooler unfriendly with extra requirements. We share those names and avoid them. 
The Ivies aren’t on the list.</p>
<p>In my own college “parent” experience we’ve found the vast majority of colleges to be extremely welcome to homeschoolers when we bring it up.</p>
<p>Note: Homeschoolers will need outside verification of grades and decent ACT or SAT scores as well as extra curriculars that match the school.</p>
<p>Are the classes offered through the on-line program rigorous or average? Highly selective colleges expect a very strong academic program (at least AP classes and followed up with success on the AP exams) coupled with SAT/ACT scores that correspond with the class grades as well as strong extra-curriculars. We found that the highly selective Vanderbilt was not impressed with our regionally-accredited transcript and still wanted all the homeschooling information from us, but our state schools didn’t care about all the homeschooling information and only cared about the accredited transcript.</p>
<p>For us, the most difficult hurdle has been getting teacher recommendations, since our ds only had us as his teachers until he dual-enrolled at the local cc. He couldn’t ask the cc instructors for recommendations, as he was working on his applications just as the cc classes began; the cc instructors just didn’t have enough information about him. The teacher recommendation info on the Common App included info like how the student responds to setbacks, leadership within the classroom, etc. which would also be difficult for a distance-learning instructor to evaluate.</p>