How many letter of recommendation should I send to colleges as a homeschooler. Is it enough to send just one extra from a internship boss or do I need more?
The colleges will specify how many they want and who they should come from. Please remember it quality not quantity.
My kids didn’t submit any more than what the colleges requested, which was two, one in a humanity class and one from a STEM class.
As a college consultant, I advise my students (and homeschoolers or others from non-traditional backgrounds in particular) to have three academic and two “other”/non-academic recommenders, if possible, to choose from. Some schools, even elite schools, can be flexible as far as how many and what type of recommender they allow. OTOH, many such as Stanford are very clear about the number and type. Having more LORs than needed can allow a student to have a choice as to whom to use for which college, remembering that the LORs are uploaded to the Common App (for example), but the student is the one that picks which letter(s) go to which schools.
Example of this: My eldest had three academic recommenders, his math mentor/teacher, his physics teacher, and his lit teacher. He ranked them according to which recs he thought would be the best, so for the schools that didn’t specify if they wanted one humanities and one STEM, he chose the math and physics recs because he thought they’d be the best. For the schools that specified they wanted one STEM and one humanities, he chose the physics prof and the lit teacher because he felt the physics prof’s letter was the best of them all (and we’d seen it already, which helped, ha-ha).
HTH.