Selective Colleges Clamor for Home Scholar

Written by Izzy Lyman

Thursday, 24 April 2008 15:02

An Illinois homeschooler has been accepted into several Ivy League colleges. Ironically, Chelsea Link feared that not even one school would want her.

Harvard Education reform newshounds will be delighted to learn that the academic bar has been raised a notch higher by another home-schooled student. Chelsea Link, who hails from Evanston, Illinois, applied to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and Northwestern. She was accepted — drumroll, please — to all seven schools.

A pretty impressive feat in its own right, yet as Chicago Tribune reporter Bonnie Miller Rubin points out, this "has been called the most competitive year ever for college admissions." The Harvard Crimson reports that Chelsea was even phoned by an admissions officer, a month before the formal acceptance letter was mailed, to inform her that she’d been accepted to the famed Massachusetts school. Sweet!

Her academic and extracurricular credentials are impeccable: Perfect ACT and SAT scores; world-class harpist skills; field trips to Tibet and Greece; conversant in French; teacher of Shakespeare to younger students.

Of course, such a top-of-the-line educational endeavor would not have been possible without Chelsea’s parents providing the encouragement, finances, and wherewithal needed to help her excel.

Cindi and Ross Link are the proprietors of a marketing-analysis business and have been facilitating their daughter’s formal education since she was of kindergarten age. Like the vast majority of contemporary women who elect to become their child’s main teacher, Mrs. Link learned as she went. She surfed the Internet for curriculum information, started a support group for gifted homeschoolers, and she traveled with Chelsea to exotic locales.

Good for you, Mom.

But it goes without saying that families don’t necessarily homeschool so their offspring can grow up to be card-carrying members of the Ivy League. In fact, more and more home educators, concerned with the volatile moral and ideological climate found in higher education, are seeking other options for their teenagers, like online or faith-based colleges. Some are simply choosing to bypass the academic scene and get on with the business of life. For example, Patrick Kocher, of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is an active twenty-something. The former homeschooler chose to marry as a teenager. He presently works as a farrier, is the father of two children, and ran as a Ron Paul delegate for the national Republican convention in Minneapolis-Saint Paul.

The possibilities are endless for those that wisely choose to use their liberties and the blessings of a free-market economy to work hard at their enterprises, be they growing their own food, starting a business, investing in real estate, teaching their sons or daughters their ABC’s, or easing the suffering of others.

But the rewards of using one’s God-given gifts to motivate one’s children to be self-starters, and bypassing government services and hand-outs, are priceless.