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Introduction
Homeschooling is an option for education that has increased considerably since the 1970s. Stereotypes of homeschooled children often include labels such as "backward" or "on the fringe" of society. This study seeks to determine whether these stereotypes have any lasting effect on homeschooled students' adjustment to college. An online survey resulted in a sample of 1 85 students from a variety of colleges and universities, both public and private. The results show that as compared to traditionally educated students, college students who were homeschooled do not exhibit any significant differences in selfesteem, and they experience significantly lower levels of depression than those with no homeschooling in their educational background. This research also reveals that homeschooled students report that they achieve higher academic success in college and view their entire college experience more positively than traditionally educated students.
Sometimes retailers and their advertisers make embarrassing blunders that force potential consumers to examine, and then define the myths and realities of a condition in society. Take for example a T-shirt advertised for J.C. Penney in 2001 that depicted a dilapidated mobile home paired with the words "Home Skooled." While store officials insisted that they did not mean to offend anyone, they pulled the product from their shelves "after enraged missives poured in from homeschooled families, some of whom threatened a boycott."' Interestingly, Stacey Bielick from the National Center for Education Statistics published a report during the same month as the T-shirt incident, which stated that over 850,000 American children were homeschooled in 1999.2 Suddenly, it is now commonplace to learn about homeschooling in mainstream popular culture, and Americans who had not thought much about the topic have formed their impressions of homeschooling through the media. As with most media portrayals, the images of homeschooling churned out over the past decade were caricatures - oversimplified, yet exaggerated. For example, a 2004 article in The Economist referred to homeschooled students as conservative "Republican foot-soldiers."3 Patrick Henry College, a private Evangelical Christian college with a "deliberate outreach to homeschooled students,"4 opened its doors in 2000, and by 2007 Hanna Rosin, senior editor at The Atlantic, helped draw national attention to the school's mission in her book, God's Harvard. It is not the primary aim of her book to...