How Do Home Schooled College Students Compare to Those From Public Schools?

A deep dive into religion, race, partisanship, socioeconomic status, and other academic measures

I grew up in a pretty conservative Southern Baptist Church in rural southern Illinois. I was there three of four times a week, on average, during my four years of high school. Our youth group was this odd mish mash of all kinds of kids. I had gone to Sunday School with some of them from the time we were in the nursery. Others were just there because they wanted to date a girl/boy who was active in the youth group.

But others were kids I only saw at church because they were homeschooled. I can recall three families in particular who were huge pillars of First Baptist Church who homeschooled their entire broods. And these weren’t small families, either. I think that they all had at least five children, if not more.

I feel like the issue of home schooling has always been part of the larger conversation about religion in the United States, especially among evangelicals. It’s hard to accurately assess the growth of homeschooling, but the Reason Foundation reports that 5.4% of kids are being homeschooled right now. Data from 2019 found that 3.3% of all students were homeschooled.

Well, I have survey data from from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), which asks current college students what type of high school they attended. I limited this sample to just those between the ages of 18 and 25, so we can just take a look at traditional college aged students.

The total sample I have is 39,559. Here’s how they responded to the question about the type of high school they attended:

• Public - 80% - 31,660

• Private - 15.7% - 6,195

• Parochial - 1% - 402

• Home School - 1.4% - 570

• Other - 1.9% - 723

An incredibly small share of 18-25 year old college going folks were homeschooled. Slightly more than one in one hundred. Now that doesn’t mean that only 1% of this age group was homeschooled, recall that this sample is those who are currently attending an institution of higher learning, but it does provide some real data about just how rare homeschooling actually is in a semi-random sample of college students.

How does high school vary by religious affiliation, though? I used every religious category employed by the FIRE survey and also collapsed private and parochial into the same category and here are the results that I got.

The vast majority of college students today were educated in a public high school. It was 80% of the entire sample, and there isn’t a ton of variation among different religious groups. However, I did want to point out that 76% of Protestants and 72% of Catholics report a public high school education.

The groups that are the most likely to have attended a private or parochial school are Jews (23%), Catholics (25%), and Hindus (27%). It’s fun to compare Catholics and Latter-day Saints, for instance. LDS were 13 points more likely to be educated in a public school and fourteen points less likely to be educated in a private or parochial school.

It’s really hard to definitively tell you what religious tradition is most likely to home school their children because these sample sizes are so small. Recall that the top level sample was nearly 40,000. There were only 27 Orthodox home schooled kids in this sample, which was 4.3% of all Orthodox respondents. That’s the most. Protestants come in second at 3.6%, followed by LDS at 2.9%. No one else is above 2%. But with the margin of error, it’s really not advisable to say which group is clearly more likely to home school.

Let’s look at this religion and home schooling question one more way before we move on to other demographic factors. This is the overall composition of home schooled students (in the blue) and public school students (in the orange). I thought this would help us get a sense of how the home schooled population differs from the public school group.

It’s pretty apparent from this data that Protestants are significantly overrepresented in the home school population. Fully 26% of home schoolers identify as Protestant, compared to only 10% of those in the public school. Notice in the bottom right the “Just Christian” category. There’s only a very small difference there - 22% vs 19%. I think that this is driven by the fact that Protestant home schoolers are taught a bit more about church history and know what the word “Protestant” means on surveys and can accurately identify themselves. But, that’s just an educated hunch.

Where else are there differences? Not in many categories, to be honest. Catholics are clearly less likely to home school their kids than send them to public schools. That’s also true of every group in the non-religious category. Among atheists, agnostics, and nothing in particulars - they are twice as likely to be in a public school compared to a home school.

But the FIRE survey has all kinds of other demographic questions beyond religion, and I just had to explore how the home schooled population is different than their peers on race, socioeconomic status, and partisanship. That’s what follows here.

I don’t think this will come as a huge surprise, but home schooled kids are more likely to be white compared to those who went to public school. Nearly three quarters of home schoolers were white, while 12% were Black, and 9% were Hispanic. One thing that I found really interesting is that the overall racial composition of public schools is nearly the same as those who went to private/parochial schools. But it’s important to point out that 73% of home schoolers are white, compared to just 58% in the public schools. When you think of home schoolers as the Duggars, you aren’t that far off from the statistical reality.

The FIRE survey also asked respondent to describe their social class growing up. Obviously this question is shot through with all kinds of survey bias on a variety of fronts, but there are still some interesting insights to glean from this exercise. For instance, you can clearly tell that kids who went to private school know that they came from a higher social strata. Forty-one percent say that they were upper-middle class or upper class. That’s easily the highest percentage of any category.

I was rather struck by how the homeschooled crowd looks almost exactly like the public school crowd when it comes to socioeconomic status, however. About 36% of the public school kids say that they were lower or working class on this survey. It was 30% of those who were homeschooled. Being able to home school one’s children is only possible for families who have enough income through one parent to take care of the household needs, thus it would seem likely that these kids came from families of means. That’s not really reflected in this survey data - home schooled kids look like public school kids.

What about politics, though. Clearly this is an area of intense interest over the last several decades. As as a headline from Slate declared last year, “How the Christian Home-Schooling Lobby Feeds on Fear of Public Schools,” there’s always been a strong perceived link between home schooling one’s children and voting for Republicans on election day.

That does come through in this data, but maybe not as strongly as many would have suspected. The FIRE survey asks the standard 7 point scale question about political partisanship. Among college students who were educated in public schools, 62% identify as Democrats and just 21% are Republicans. The private school crowd is slightly to the right, but not by much - 56% are Democrats and 26% are Republicans.

However, the home school group are significantly more likely to identify as Republican. Forty-six percent say that they are Republicans - with 16% describing themselves as “strong Republicans” compared to just just 6% of those who were educated in the public schools. Just 36% of home schooled kids say that they are Democrats and only 13% are “strong Democrats.” I do find it interesting how homeschoolers were nearly as likely to say that they were strong Democrats as strong Republicans (13% vs 16%), though.

Let’s pivot over to education, however. When a home schooled young person is thinking about what types of institution to attend for their college education, what schools do they pick? The FIRE survey tried to recruit students from a variety of colleges and universities across the United States and managed to pull in a diverse pool of both publics and privates.

I know this is going to be come as a major surprise, but of the sample that FIRE collected from Liberty University - nearly one in five said that they were home schooled. Recall that in the entire sample, about 1% of all respondents were home schooled, so Liberty’s students contain what is likely the highest concentration of home schooled kids in the United States. They are followed closely by Hillsdale College at 19%. The New Yorker ran a piece about Hillsdale just a few months ago with the headline, “The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture War.” It’s known for it’s conservative leaning and political activism.

Compared to Hillsdale and Liberty, no other school really comes close to having such a concentration of homeschoolers in their classrooms. A quick scan of the list does find a pretty strong pattern, though. Lots of these schools are in the South. UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Kentucky. Not a lot of liberal arts schools on the list, not a lot of places in New England, either. Home schoolers flock to conservative Christian schools or publics in the South.

What about majors? Do kids who came from a home schooled environment choose a different course of study than those who were not home schooled?

Not really, according to this data. The most popular major for both groups is engineering, followed by biology. I do think it’s kind of interesting that home schooled kids are much less likely to pursue computer science compared to those who weren’t home schooled. I don’t know what to do with that information, but there it is.

What shows up on the home schooled list that doesn’t appear among other students? Agriculture/food science - okay, I can kind of understand that one considering home schooled kids are probably more likely to grow up in rural environments. But here’s a big shocker - African-American Studies. It was the ninth most popular major in the home schooled list. It doesn’t even show up among the top ten among the non-home schoolers. I honestly don’t have any inclinations as to why that is.

This is why I love data. Sometimes it confirms your priors and sometimes it doesn’t. Home schooled kids are more likely to go to Liberty and Hillsdale. They are more likely to be Republicans. No huge shocker there. But on other metrics they don’t look much different than other young people. In terms of socioeconomic class, they are basically the same as public school kids. They also choose majors that are largely in line with the rest of their peers.

I think it’s pretty hard to know if the home school movement is actually growing or not. It’s an incredibly difficult data problem to solve because home schooling is like non-denominational Christianity - they don’t really report to anyone. Form this data, it doesn’t appear that they are some type of serious factor in American politics or society. I would be very surprised if more than 3% of American adults were home schooled throughout their entire K-12 education. They do, in many ways, embody the conservative Christian strain of American society, but they are more of a symbol than an actual force in the political discourse at this moment.

Code for this post can be found here.