Record: Daniel L. Bennett, Elyssa Edwards, and Courtney Ngai, “Homeschool Background, Time Use and Academic Performance at a Private Religious College” in Educational Studies 45, no. 3 (2019), pp. 305-325. [abstract here]
Summary: Bennett, an economics professor at Baylor‘s Libertarian-leaning Baugh Center who taught for two years at Patrick Henry College (PHC), along with Edwards and Ngai, both former students at PHC, here present the results of a comparison between the homeschooled students at PHC with those who attended conventional schools.
After a brief historical orientation the authors explain their study. In 2015 they sent out a voluntary survey to the entire PHC student body asking about students’ grade point averages, time use, educational backgrounds, personality type, major, and class rank. They then used a regression analysis to determine to what degree homeschooling affected the other variables. They received back 109 out of a possible 326 surveys, about 1/3 of the PHC student body. Some 94% of those surveyed had had at least some homeschooling, and 76% had been homeschooled for their entire k-12 educations.
While the study discussed the impact of other variables on academic performance, for the key variable of homeschooling the authors found that there was no measurable difference between homeschooled and non-homeschooled students at Patrick Henry College. They also found that whether or not homeschooling parents went to college, academic performance was the same. Finally, ACT score was more predictive of GPA for traditionally-schooled students than for homeschooled students at PHC.
Appraisal: As the authors acknowledge, “given the uniqueness of the institution and its student body, the results of the sample are likely not generalisable to the U.S. student population.” (p. 311) Those who know the U.S. homeschooling scene know all about Patrick Henry College, which was founded by HSLDA’s Michael Farris explicitly for homeschooled children, first opening its doors in 2000. That 94% of the survey sample had been homeschooled at least some time in their lives says a lot. It also makes me wonder exactly how the authors did their comparisons. Nowhere in the study do they explain how they coded for homeschool or no homeschool or what the N was for each category. Did only those who homeschooled K-12 qualify? Or would even one year of homeschooling be enough? It seems odd to me that that key definition was not provided. In the end it didn’t matter, for no differences were found. The study also did not provide any descriptive statistics to give us a sense of how wide the GPA spread might have been in the sample. Given the very homogeneous population, the very homogeneous expectations for student life, and the very homogeneous curriculum at PHC, I wonder if there was really enough variation in the overall sample to even run a study like this. But run it was, and the finding that homeschooling was not an important variable is consistent with the great majority of previous studies of college-educated homeschoolers.
Milton Gaither, Messiah College