@Homeschooler14, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.
I’m curious what is the REAL reason for wanting to start college so young?
Why have you decided that you WILL attend early, even if the schools accepting you aren’t real fits for you, even if you would experience social barriers/isolation in college? You would “settle” rather than spend another year as a high-schooler, developing ECs, taking more advanced classes.
WHY is this? Do you desperately want to leave home? Do you feel your life will be so much better at college (ANY college?) Or do you have some particular life goals you want to achieve by a certain age (which would be pretty ironic if that’s the case, given that you don’t believe that age makes a difference).
I’m not asking to be intrusive or critical. I’m sincerely asking if you’re doing this to fill some need you’re not getting in your present life that you feel you’d get in college. And wondering if there’s another way for you to get what you feel you need. Because I’m not optimistic that going away to college at sixteen is going to give you what you think you want, but something else might do so. And doing something you enjoy, that challenges you, might help you get the most out of college when you do go.
Second, I’d like to ask you why your parents won’t consider letting you do a year at a boarding prep school for bright, ambitious students, or a post-high-school/early college program, or a year-abroad program?
If your parents have no issues with you going away to college and living in an apartment at age sixteen, I have a hard time understanding why they wouldn’t support another kind of learning program away from home that could be extremely enriching to you (in a way that either your public high school or homeschooling is not).
It seems that money is no object for your parents, nor is giving you the freedom to live away from home at sixteen. it seems that prestige is not a big factor for them since they’d let you go early to college (to a less-selective school than you might have gone to if you’d waited).
Just for curiosity’s sake (I mean, what do you have to lose?), Google websites for “AFS” and “The Experiment In International Living” (well-respected semester/year/summer-abroad programs for high school students). maybe you’ve decided that that’s not your thing, but you can’t tell me that you wouldn’t mature significantly, expand your social/cultural awareness exponentially, challenge yourself academically, learn a language through immersion (light-years better than anything you can achieve in your online or CC classes) and be much, much more prepared for the multi-dimensional challenges of college by doing this, whether you’d go to France, Ghana, Argentina or Thailand. If you want to excel in finance or international business, you certainly can’t go wrong by becoming a person-of-the-world, understanding life outside of the particular bubble you live in (we all live in bubbles, not demeaning you here).
No one is berating you for your age, BTW. We’ve all been young. Our children have all been young, and we cherish our children at each age. What we’re saying is, savor and honor and live FULLY each life stage. That is the best foundation for everything that comes later in life. You may be an adult for fifty, sixty or eighty years. You have little time left to enjoy being a teenager.