Do Homeschoolers Do Well? An Honest Look at the Research

If you are weighing homeschooling, you have probably already run into both versions of the answer. One says homeschoolers run circles around everyone. The other says they fall behind. Here is the honest version, with the parts both sides tend to leave out.

Every family thinking about this asks some form of the same question. Will my kid still do well. It is a fair thing to want to know, and the internet will hand you a confident answer in either direction within about ten seconds. The real picture is messier than either headline, and a lot more useful.

The impressive numbers, and why to read them carefully

You will see them everywhere. Homeschool students scoring around the 85th percentile on standardized tests, well above the national average. The most quoted of these come from the National Home Education Research Institute, often from studies led by Brian Ray. On the SAT, the last year the College Board broke out a homeschool group, back in 2014, homeschoolers averaged around 1092 against a national average near 1010.

Those numbers are real. The catch that rarely travels with them is where they come from. Most are drawn from families who volunteered to be studied, usually through paid testing services, and those families lean heavily married, college educated, and higher income. When you compare a group like that to the national average without accounting for any of it, you are mostly measuring the families, not the schooling. Any honest homeschool parent should know that before repeating the stat at a party.

What the careful studies find

The research that controls for who the students actually are tells a quieter story. A 2016 study of 732 homeschooled students across 140 colleges, by Yu, Sackett, and Kuncel, found that once you match students on background and preparation, there was no meaningful difference in first year college GPA. The homeschoolers did about as well as everyone else. Not better, not worse.

A smaller Canadian study by Martin-Chang in 2011 found something more interesting. Kids in structured, planned homeschooling were ahead of their public school peers. Kids in unstructured homeschooling were behind on every measure they tested. The headline there is not public versus home. It is whether anyone was actually running the thing.

What happens in adulthood

The best data here comes from the Cardus Education Survey, which uses a representative national sample instead of volunteers. Its 2024 findings are sobering if you came looking for a victory lap. As a group, adults who were homeschooled were a little less likely to work full time or finish a four year degree, and earned somewhat less than their peers. Some of that is choice. Long term homeschoolers were also far less likely to say money was very important to them.

The same survey found the other side. Long term homeschoolers reported the highest life satisfaction of any group, the lowest rates of feeling helpless about life, and higher rates of volunteering and giving. Whether that comes from the schooling or from the kind of family that commits to it for years, the survey cannot say. Probably some of both.

So, do homeschoolers do well?

The honest answer is that homeschooling done deliberately holds its own, and homeschooling done passively does not. The dramatic percentile gaps you see quoted are mostly a story about who chooses to homeschool and who signs up to be tested. When a family does this on purpose, with a real plan and real attention, the academic results are solid. When it drifts, they are not. That is not a knock on homeschooling. It is the most important thing a new homeschool family can hear, because it points straight at the one part that is actually in your hands, which is how you show up for it.

A better question hiding underneath

There is a fair question buried in the first one. Do well at what. Most of the research measures test scores and income, because those are the things that are easy to count. For our family, those were never the scoreboard. We pay more attention to whether our kids can think, read and write well, and grow into good people who carry their weight. You get to decide what you are optimizing for. The research just suggests you decide it on purpose, the same way it says to run the schooling itself.

So if you are still weighing it, that instinct is the right one. Go in clear eyed about what the numbers do and do not say. Then pick what you actually care about and do the thing with attention. Structured, planned, paid attention is the part that shows up in every honest version of the research, and keeping the plan and the records in one place is a large part of how real families keep that up over years instead of weeks.