We had family members who homeschooled. With their first kid, several schools mentioned that the kid was rejected for not having four years of a language. ( Apparently, the parent who homeschools also acts as the guidance counselor so gets more insight into the process). The kids are bi-lingual French and travel to France each year. Don’t know if the oldest took an AP in French ( it’s doubtful). And kid was doing CS, so you would think it wouldn’t matter but it did. It was two schools specifically that cited it. The schools were not HYPM.
Do kids who travel to France every year read Voltaire and Rousseau and write essays (in French) on their insights?
The colleges which ask for foreign language study aren’t asking “can you order ice cream all over the world”. I think kids who grow up bilingual have tremendous advantages- but studying a foreign language is still a different exercise academically.
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Well, these kids are from a family which owns a winery!! And the winery also makes champagne ( which can’t be called that as it’s technically not in the Champagne area). They definitely can converse and know the French culture.
I’m a huge supporter of language learning. But I’m also a realist and seen people who think they speak fluent X ( language) stumble through “Hello, I’d like a coffee” I worked in an international field for many years and about 90% of the people who claimed they were fluent were not. We had to test them. Most failed. Kids who learned in their family are far better, on average.
Sadly, the American educational system emphasizes grammar and literature rather than speaking. It’s gotten better over the last decades. But it’s eon’s away from Denmark, Holland, or Germany where tiny kids learn to speak English and can communicate in many languages fluently by middle school.
If you can’t order ice cream, you don’t speak the language, IMO. LOL. That’s a bare necessity.
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You can own half of the Loire valley, you can do Rubik’s cube in three minutes in your head, you can recite Beowulf in the original. That doesn’t mean you’ve STUDIED a foreign language, taken four years of math, taken HS English.
Who cares that the family owns a winery? I know plenty of homeschool families who play fast and loose with their state’s requirements. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a college to have minimum academic standards for a home schooled kid.
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Every college has their own policy. OP, re your question on “HYPSM”, 4 of them specify years of a foreign language, not FL to a specific level:
MIT recommends 2 years;
Stanford looks for 3 years;
Harvard recommends 4;
Princeton expects 4.
That leaves Yale, which specifically does not give a preference. Do the same check for other colleges before applying.
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Level is probably implied. Seems doubtful that any of those colleges will be impressed by an applicant with four (or more) different level 1 high school foreign language courses.
Of course, there are numerous paths to foreign language learning that may not neatly fit into the “start at level 1 in 9th grade, complete level 4 in 12th grade” progression that requirements and recommendations often assume. Even among those who are not heritage speakers, there are students who start in middle or elementary school and top out the high school foreign language courses in 9th or 10th grade. While UCs provide plenty of detail about how they consider the various paths to the level of proficiency they want to see, most other colleges leave it vague, so applicants and others just have to guess as to what they really want to see. (And if there is home schooling involved, there is yet another dimension to proving that the home schooling in the subject meets or exceeds typical standards.)
you are right- the websites typically specify “of one language”
This is definitely my daughter’s situation. She went to a private middle school where the French teacher was a native speaker and there were only four kids in her class. Come public high school, she maxed out at AP French in 10th grade. We looked hard (including getting help from her AP French teacher) and we couldn’t come up with a solution for a higher course that would work with her high school schedule. She loves French and is the French club president and will act as a teachers aid next year in AP French (this option was only available to her a senior). One of her recommendations will also be from the AP French teacher. It seems crazy that reaching a high level early would work against kids 
I suspect that’s why most places ‘recommend’. Note that the OP is in a different situation: s/he knew that the AP would meet the in-state FL requirement but (if the GC didn’t flag) may not have realized that the super-selectives s/he is aiming for are looking for more than that.
For your daughter, she has maxxed out on what her school offers- and the colleges all emphasize that they consider the school context- so it would not work against her. Also, the OP is a heritage speaker, which I gather your daughter is not. Most importantly, this will only matter for the OP if s/he is looking at the super-selective schools outside the UC system.
Btw, the solution - TA’ing for the AP class - is an excellent example of a student pushing themselves and following a true interest!
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Absolutely agree!
I had to retrace my steps in learning the “correct” grammatical rules in Spanish because, although fluent, I couldn’t write it well and didn’t have an advanced Spanish vocabulary. I could speak it, and read it, but I wanted to be able to read novels in Spanish (Miguel de Cervantes’, Don Quixote) and write well in Spanish. When I studied French, I learned how the syntax functioned and cues to use in the written language and I wanted the same in Spanish.
It took my going to Spain to recognize that my Spanish was not that great!
I had to meet my daughter in Madrid and Barcelona. The Spanish that I learned, in my home, was not the Spanish that was spoken in Spain (which she now speaks well).
It was very rapid and interspersed with dialects.
With Catalan, I had difficulty. It was easier for me to speak in French while in Barcelona!!
(When I took the Spanish coursework in college, we briefly touched on some of the other languages and dialects.) Going to Spain was a completely different matter, (vale?)
If I were applying to colleges now, I would write about this experience. It was difficult to speak well in Spain, but I had my French to fall back upon. If I had never taken French, I would not have been able to communicate effectively.
My view is that I had a decent first language and I wanted to improve the “gaps” that were missing in high school which were not “formally taught” by my family, and this came later.
For college requirements, I needed to study a “foreign” language that would be challenging but rewarding. I got into UC’s, CSU’s and several well-regarded privates.
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I grew up in a trilingual home. I also needed FL at school in one of those languages because I couldn’t read or write at all. I took 4 years of that language in HS plus 3 years of Latin at the recommendation of the GC, and that was back in the stone ages.
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Did I make a mistake of taking the AP class too early? Should I have done 4 honors, 5 honors, then AP in 9th-11th?
or did i make a mistake in general taking a language colleges will assume i had an easy time learning? should I have taken Spanish in middle school and in high school done 2, 3, 4H, AP?
coulda, woulda, shoulda…doesn’t really matter at this point.
What matters is that 1) you (and your application) are more than this one factor and 2) now that you know that for some unis, it’s not ideal, you can make sure that you mostly apply to places where it doesn’t really matter.
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Has she looked at Alliance Francaise? They have classes and can test at a very high level. Haven’t looked recently but I’d imagine they have some courses online. Also, you can often find good French classes through a local French consulate/other groups if there is one by you. I think that a college level course could be counted as a year of foreign language. But some of the other options might be able to count as well.
Yup, cow left the barn on this one for OP. For parents/students who are reading through this, @blossom and @collegemom3717 hit it on the head. Elite colleges aren’t trying to fill their classes with multilingual fluent speakers when they lay out their language requirements/recommendations. They want students who have intellectual curiosity and persistence, ones that will push themselves to study a variety of subjects, including a foreign language on top of math, science, english and social sciences. A heritage speaker who takes his/her heritage language who starts at a low level or just tests out is not demonstrating traits that these colleges are looking for. If you are a heritage speaker, imo you have to go beyond level 4 or even 5, to college level literature/composition types of courses to make the “right impression”. If that is not your interest, stick with the 4 year progression of a new language.
OP, focus on the other strong aspects of your record. The more you try to manipulate around this language issue, the more attention you will draw to it, which is not beneficial in my view.
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Of course, doing this requires knowing the optimal foreign language path for college admissions while in middle school. Not every heritage speaker entering middle school is aware of the (often not clearly stated, but often assumed) issues in foreign language course choices and paths at various different colleges, nor are they necessarily advised on all of the possibilities at different colleges by school counselors.
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Studying a foreign language is NOT an exotic activity in most public school systems in the US. And in many districts, opting OUT requires paperwork and signatures and “savvy”, but just taking French or Spanish or whatever is the default option.
I don’t think a kid needs massive amounts of savvy to take a foreign language. And the rare HS which has no foreign language at all- the GC explains it in the comments, just like the HS’s with no calculus or physics do.
We’re not talking about a HS with zero foreign language- we’re talking about kids who opt out of foreign language study even though it’s offered.
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However, what posters above are saying is that a heritage speaker taking suitably advanced courses in the heritage language and finishing the highest level in 9th or 10th grade would be seen as “opt[ing] out of foreign language study” by some colleges. This is not obvious to every middle school student, parent, or counselor. Indeed, some schools offer heritage speaker versions of some foreign languages, implicitly encouraging heritage speakers to advance their knowledge and skill in their heritage language. If this is a negative for some college admissions, it seems to be unknown in those high schools.
Also, would a non-heritage speaker who went through an elementary school immersion program and reaches the highest available level in 9th grade be similar penalized for having “only one year” (although at the highest available level) by those same colleges?
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That’s my kids. They aren’t heritage speakers of Spanish, but did do an immersion program via the public schools. I posted about my daughter’s situation (with some different issues, but involving FL) recently, because I did fear that she would be penalized if she didn’t take Spanish after AP Span Lang as a frosh.
IMO, yes.
As a data point of one, which I shared before, although born and raised in Europe, I went to HS in the US, at one of these “feeder” schools often discussed. Like many from my country, I am multilingual. My mother tongue was not taught at the HS, but two of my learned languages were. Based on placement, my graduation requirement was one term of FL. My GC strongly advised, if I were considering top colleges, to either start a new language from scratch for 3+ years or continue one of my K-8 languages for at least.two years
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