Don't you just love the opportunities new technology opens? Today you'll want to check out free downloadable courses from Ivy League schools! Several Ivy League universities now make popular courses available online for free.  Some include complete video lectures.  Some only give notes, reading lists, syllabi, tests and a video introduction by the professor.  Some even include forum-style interaction with other students! If you do not live near a community college or if your student has maxed out the opportunities offered there, these courses could be your life-savers.  If you just need to inject some excitement into your at home classes, these courses and public lectures will really do the trick. Naturally, the Ivy Leagues involved do not award credit for your student's participation in the online courses, but the credibility of those courses on your student's transcript will be high. Here is your initial shopping list: Stanford University's Stanford Engineering Everywhere offers Stanford's most popular engineering series.  Not just freshman courses. MIT's Video Gateway opens the way to public lectures and forums as well as a wide variety of open courseware.  Not just engineering courses, but arts and humanities, too. UChannel provides a free subscription service to public lectures from top universities throughout the English-speaking world. Lectures and ...

As your student comes into his junior year, your pocketbook gets raided by fees for all those college entrance exams.  There may be relief for you. College Board offers fee waivers through the local high school where your student would take the SAT, ACT, etc. Visit the school counselor at that school, bringing with you your most recent tax forms.  The counselor will assess whether to give you a waiver or not. Generally, if your family would qualify for the free or reduced-lunch program at that school, the counselor will grant the waiver. The College Board fee waiver is good for two SATs, one in the junior year and one in the senior year. Fee waivers for SAT subject area exams (SAT II) are good for up to 3 different tests.  They also waive the reporting fees for sending your scores to up to four colleges. Even better, many colleges will waive their application fees if your student received an SAT fee waiver!  You will need to ask about the policy of the colleges your student wants to attend. It is well worth the visit to the high school counselor's office.  You could save hundreds of dollars. For more details visit College Board.

If you have a Senior, this Fall is the semester when most of the large private scholarship applications must be made.  The big private scholarships have their deadlines November to January, and begin narrowing the field around Christmas time.  So it is wise to protect some of your Senior's time during this semester to allow him/her to do justice to those applications and essays. Here are a few of the larger private scholarships which have fall application deadlines, some as early as mid-October. There are many more. Discover Card Scholarship Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation AXA Achievement Scholarship Horatio Alger Association Scholarship My top recommendation for finding the large scholarships that would apply to your student is to make a profile at www.fastweb.com. FastWeb will comb the internet looking for scholarships that match your student's profile.  So the more detailed your profile, the more closely the scholarships will match your credentials. FastWeb found so many scholarships for my daughters that they did not have time to pursue any under $5,000.  My children treated scholarship application as their part-time job during the fall of that Senior year. But the return was far greater than any part-time job I've ever met: about a half-million dollars in scholarship offers for each girl.

College Board testing season is upon us! If your student needs to take a PSAT or SAT or ACT exam this year, you should be looking now for a local public or private school which will allow your student to take the test. The 2008 PSAT/NMSQT test dates are Wednesday, October 15 and Saturday, October 18. This fall’s SAT dates are October 4 and November 1, and the registration for the first date has been extended to this Friday, Sept 19th. Find registration details at College Board.com. The PSAT scores in the student’s junior year will enter him or her in the National Merit Scholarship competition. The National Merit Scholarship itself is rather small, however it identifies the top fraction of the top 1% of all juniors who take the test. This makes those students stand out to college recruiters and to other scholarship committees. Many colleges offer full-ride scholarships plus perks to students recognized or commended by National Merit, as well as to the scholars themselves. On one of the forums I visit (homeschool2college on yahoo), this basic question was asked about advancing a student directly from his sophomore year to his senior year: If my son ...

Though academics are extremely important, the season of preparation for your young people must include more practical grounding as well. Both college admissions offices and scholarship review boards want students who are more than great minds. By the time our young people launch out, they need to be able to demonstrate to the world that They care about others and have invested themselves in the community They have usable skills which have already been tested They have vision and focus For themselves, our youth need to know that they are competent enough that others will value their work. They need to know that they have marketable skills and that they do not have to be subject to the vagaries of an insane job market. They need work experience – better yet, they need entrepreneurial experience. None of these things has a place in the transcript. In fact, much of what we want our young people to develop in these final critical years before they launch can’t be adequately described or celebrated on a transcript. In short, they need a resume! Tune in on Tuesdays for resume-building ideas and resources.

Making a "Mommy Transcript" translate into a document that college admission officers can respect requires that you verify achievement across the curriculum.  In other words, you need someone who is unrelated to your student to notice and rank your student's work in a particular field. Recently, a friend brought this resource to my attention. National History Day is a contest sponsored in part by the History Channel.  Students in middle school and high school compete for college scholarship money by preparing a paper, a 10-minute documentary film, an exhibit or a 10-minute performance on the current year's topic.  Students present their work at a division-level competition, usually in February or March (varies by state), and can advance to the state-level in April/May and finally to the national competition in early June at the University of Maryland. Cash awards are given at junior and senior high levels for each category.  Gold medalists earn $1000, Silver medalists $500 and Bronze medalists $250.  Gold medalists in the documentary category earn $5000 from the History Channel.  Numerous other organizations from the US Marine Corps to the Agricultural Historical Society offer special prizes based on the focus of the presentation. Several colleges offer scholarships to those who ...

Time was when summer was a time of feverish activity, the farmers’ busiest season. Formal schooling went to the back burner while young people lent their strength to ensuring that the family could survive the lean season which would follow. As we have become an urban people, the summer break has become a season of self-indulgence rather than a season of productivity. How did our forefathers manage to maintain a higher level of academic achievement, while taking an extended annual break from education per se? Perhaps it’s time for a re-evaluation. According to a celebrated 1996 study, “Summer Learning Loss: The Problem and Some Solutions”, students lose about two months of progress over the summer. Researchers concluded that the learning loss was proportional to the lack of intellectual stimulation of the student during the summer. Students who read during the summer experienced less academic erosion. Interestingly, no attempt was made to assess the impact of work on older student’s academic retention rates. Was the summer break of old a time when no learning occurred? No. Young people essentially received an internship in farm management, horticulture, business, animal husbandry, food preparation and preservation, etc. while working under the mentorship of their ...

If you are a rising Senior with college aspirations, you’ll find no better summer job than a serious pursuit of college scholarships. Set aside 15-20 hours per week – about the same amount of time as a part-time job – to search and to apply for scholarships. During the summer, you’ll have time to hone your scholarship essays into finely crafted appeals aimed specifically at each scholarship. You’ll have time to sort through the many possible scholarships to find those that will give you the best prospects for the most money. Where will you find the scholarships? Countdown to College lists three pages of scholarship websites and search engines in the appendix, and the Countdown to College E-Forms CD includes them as live links. But if you only have time to use one search engine, try www.fastweb.com When you make your initial visit to FastWeb, set aside an hour or so to complete its detailed profile questionnaire. FastWeb searches the Web for scholarships that match your profile, and collects them in a web page built just for you. You can set your FastWeb options to have the search engine email you when a scholarship deadline is approaching. FastWeb ...

Chloe We were desperate. Chloe needed higher education if we were to be faithful stewards of her gifts, but there was absolutely no money for it. I began to research college entrance and scholarship requirements. As I read, I realize how little most of us understand about the process, and how possible it is for diligent homeschoolers to bring in large scholarships. The Countdown to College materials are the result of that search. Eventually, Chloe was offered over $500,000 in scholarships to five colleges, and had her choice among top colleges across the country. Today, she is at the University of Denver, a highly-ranked private college, with everything paid for through her MA, if she wants it! Study abroad, books, room and board, computers, tuition and fees…Even better, the skills she practiced while applying for scholarships to college now permit her to find and to successfully write grants to fund her academic practicum projects and ministry start-up costs. So the college is funding her entrance into the entrepreneurial world. William William had always planned to go to college but did not know how to make it work due to the enormous financial burden. With ...