Over the last 30 years in which we at Ivy Coach have been in business helping students earn admission to the colleges of their dreams, we’ve noticed a trend or two concerning parents navigating the churning waters of the elite college admissions process. Today, we thought we’d write about one such trend that we’ve identified with utter certainty. That trend? Parents of home-schooled children — not all, but indeed many! — are often not in touch with reality. There, we said it. And we’ll stand by it — no matter how many homeschooler moms (or dads for that matter) write us to chastise us after this post goes viral on all those home-schooled mommy blogs that are filled with misinformation about the highly selective college admissions process. We’re not changing our minds.

You see, in our experience, many home-schooled parents think they know better. They think they know better than teachers and school counselors in both public and private schools. They think they know better than us. It’s why we rarely, if ever, take them on as clients. In fact, we can’t recall a time in which we’ve taken on a home-schooled parent over the last three decades as we’re usually scared away from wishing to work with them from the initial free consultation designed to answer questions about our services. Yes, they scare us away that quickly. We don’t want their money. It’s just not worth it to us to offer advice to parents who don’t want to hear it and who think they know best. If they know best, great. They can navigate the college admissions process themselves. We’ll likely hear from them after their children don’t get in. Maybe then, if they’ve had that epiphany that their grand plan didn’t work out so well for their child, they just might heed our advice.

There are lots of things home-schooler parents should do to optimize their child’s case for admission to elite universities. After all, their child didn’t attend a regular school. Admissions officers at our nation’s top schools are going to, naturally, have some fears. Anyone who tells you they won’t have such fears isn’t telling you the cold, hard truth and is probably one of those mommies or daddies on one of those home-schooled blogs. In the end, we have the strategy to assuage many of these fears. But, if you’re a home-schooler mom or dad, it’s us who will be the judge if you’re deserving of learning our strategy because, frankly, we believe in the 80-20 principle of business. And home-schooler moms and dad so often don’t fit with our grounding business principle. If they don’t want to listen to us and think they know best, that’s just fine with us.