Interesting -- are you saying that the FAFSA asks for your entire earnings history since your child was born?

Yes, and I don't think the reasons for this are entirely educational. College is partly a credentialing scam, and colleges would prefer that the only way to get the credential be to hand them tens of thousands of dollars.

I went to an elite school and do not recall there being any transfer students from community colleges. Even if you could transfer, I wonder if it would be a good idea, especially for STEM majors. I really doubt that two years of math or physics at most community colleges would prepare a student to take junior-level math or physics courses at a school like MIT. A better way to save money and still attend an elite school is to get good scores on several AP Exams and enter with sophomore standing, finishing in three years.

Since you are not sure what option is best, I suggest sending her to the school. Either (a) it will be great (b) it won't be as good as what you can provide at home, in which case you can resume homeschooling. Why not give the school a try? FWIW I am an afterschooler, not a homeschooler.

Why wouldn't a smart kid want to go to a school like Yale? Don't musically talented kids want to go to Juilliard? Why are you anti-Ivy? I can think of some good reasons, but also some bad ones. In general, I don't see what you are concerned about. What it takes to get into Yale is what other selective colleges want, only more so. There would be only be a problem if your son had a "Yale or bust" attitude.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17business-t.html The Default Major: Skating Through B-School By DAVID GLENN This article is a collaboration between The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education, a daily source of news, opinion and commentary for professors, administrators and others interested in academe. David Glenn is a senior writer at The Chronicle covering teaching and curriculum. PAUL M. MASON does not give his business students the same exams he gave 10 or 15 years ago. “Not many of them would pass,†he says. Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,†he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.†That might sound like a kids-these-days lament, but all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education. Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,†the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major. This is not a small corner of academe. The family of majors under the business umbrella — including finance, accounting, marketing, management and “general business†— accounts for just over 20 percent, or more than 325,000, of all bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in the United States, making it the most popular field of study. Brand-name programs — the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business, and a few dozen others — are full of students pulling 70-hour weeks, if only to impress the elite finance and consulting firms they aspire to join. But get much below BusinessWeek’s top 50, and you’ll hear pervasive anxiety about student apathy, especially in “soft†fields like management and marketing, which account for the majority of business majors. <rest of article at link> There may be a few worthwhile business programs, but in general I am dubious of their value. Bright engineering, science, and (mathematically competent) English majors can teach themselves the business knowledge necessary when they start working.

Perhaps Kathy is too polite to say directly that she has very intelligent children. I majored in physics at a selective instititution and think her curricula make sense -- for the top 1%. One way to see if your kids are MIT-smart is to have them participate in a talent search in 7th grade (taking the SAT or ACT). If they don't qualify for the summer courses based on their scores, they may be smart, but not MIT-smart.

I don't have any tips not already mentioned by others, but I will mention that at the high school level, homeschooling courses look much cheaper than tuition at private universities. For example, the EPGY online calculus sequence costs $1500 for 3 courses http://epgy.stanford.edu/applyandregister/tuition.html . If a 1st-year college student is paying $20K in tuition for 5 courses, with calculus being one of them, that is $4000 for the calculus course. My 7yo boy has completed EPGY Beginning Algebra, the last math course that one can take through the cheaper "Open Enrollment" plan. I am trying to use the above logic to convince my wife that the full-price EPGY courses are still worth considering. I am aware of alternatives such as AOPS and Thinkwell. Besides college tuition, what can really cost a lot is private lessons, whether for academics, sports, or music.

http://www.il-chess.org/non_joom/docs/CL_Manion_April_2011-1.pdf The April 2011 issue of Chess Life magazine has a long story about Josh Manion, who was homeschooled, for some years a serious chess player, and now a tech entrepreneur and married father of three. I thought it was interesting and encouraging.

My eldest son is in elementary school but has studied some Algebra. I am thinking purchasing the Algebra II course from "The Great Courses" -- for a short time it costs only $80+shipping . There are 18 hours of videos plus a 300-page workbook. I wonder if anyone has tried this course. Alternatives I am considering are algebra courses from the Art of Problem Solving, EPGY, and Thinkwell. He is young enough that we can go over Algebra II more than once. It's less important that the course be rigorous than that it keep his interest.

http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/jacobs-hyman/ The College Decision From The Professors’ Perspective By LYNN F. JACOBS and JEREMY S. HYMAN New York Times, April 9, 2011 The main points are (1) Focus on the academics. (2) Play down the “rankings.†(3) Don’t make a hobby into a deal-breaker. (4) Imagine yourself there. with more detail in the article. I think it is sensible advice.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03perlin.html Unpaid Interns, Complicit Colleges By ROSS PERLIN New York Times April 2, 2011 ON college campuses, the annual race for summer internships, many of them unpaid, is well under way. But instead of steering students toward the best opportunities and encouraging them to value their work, many institutions of higher learning are complicit in helping companies skirt a nebulous area of labor law. Colleges and universities have become cheerleaders and enablers of the unpaid internship boom, failing to inform young people of their rights or protect them from the miserly calculus of employers. In hundreds of interviews with interns over the past three years, I found dejected students resigned to working unpaid for summers, semesters and even entire academic years — and, increasingly, to paying for the privilege. For the students, the problems are less philosophical and legal than practical. In 2007, for instance, Will Batson, a Colgate University student from Augusta, Ga., and a son of two public-interest lawyers, worked as an unpaid, full-time summer intern for WNBC and had to scramble for shelter in New York City. “It definitely hurt my confidence,†Mr. Batson told me. He recalled crashing on more than 20 floors and couches, being constantly short on cash and fearing he would have to quit and go home. His father, he said, felt like a failure for not being able to help him rent an apartment. What makes WNBC — whose parent company, General Electric, is valued at more than $200 billion — think it can get away with this? In Mr. Batson’s case, a letter from Colgate, certifying that he was receiving credit for doing the internship. (Now 24, he gave up on journalism and is at a technology start-up. NBC calls its internship program “an important recruiting tool.â€) <rest of article at link> Needless to say, I would like to have my children get paid when they work, both during and after their college years.

The general problem is that admissions to the most selective schools have become ever more competitive. Holding test scores constant, your child will be at a disadvantage if (1) you are white or Asian -- see http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html (2) you or your husband are not an alumnus (selective schools have "legacy" preferences) (3) you and your husband are well-educated (selective schools have lower standards for applicants who are the first in their family to attend college). I think colleges should not be exempt from civil rights laws and that those that discriminate on the basis of race should not get any federal aid. I am waiting for the Republicans to take up this issue.

The 1869 exam is at http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf The NYT article linking to it Remembering When College Was a Buyer’s Bazaar by ALISON LEIGH COWAN is at http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/remembering-when-college-was-a-buyers-bazaar/ . The exam is a little relevant to classical homeschoolers today, since Harvard and other universities used to offer classical educations and require such knowledge from applicants. The exam topics are Latin Greek History and Geography Arithmetic Logarithms and Trigonometry Algebra Plane Geometry

http://www.boston.com/community/moms/articles/2011/03/27/on_call_all_night_can_leave_texting_teens_tired_out/ Connected, exhausted: Texting teenagers who stay ‘on call’ all night pay the price in lost sleep By Beth Teitell Boston Globe Staff / March 27, 2011 ... With teenagers sending and receiving an average of 3,276 texts per month in the last quarter of 2010, according to the most recent statistics from the Nielsen Co., it’s no wonder that Michael Rich, director of Children’s Hospital Boston’s Center on Media and Child Health, is starting to see young patients who come in exhausted by being “on call’’ or semi-alert all night as they wait for their phones to vibrate or ring with a text. He and his patients’ parents were initially baffled by the children’s increased sleepiness because bedtimes hadn’t changed, he said. “Who would think to ask a kid, ‘Do you sleep with your phone under your pillow?’ To us, it sounds like torture.’’ Children who text late into the night do not fall asleep as well, he said, and they don’t enter the deep sleep of Stage 4 REM sleep, “which is crucial to moving experiences and lessons of the day from short-term into long-term memory — in other words, completing the learning process.’’ Anticipating texts, Rich explained, leads to a bad night’s sleep in the same way as an early morning flight or other predawn obligation. “You’re so focused on not screwing up your wake-up that you don’t sleep as well.’’ A Pew Research Center study from 2010 reported that more than four out of five teens with cellphones sleep with the phone on or near the bed, sometimes falling asleep with it in their hands in the middle of a conversation. Pew researchers did not ask whether the phones were on, but Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist, said “many expressed reluctance to ever turn their phones off.’’ <rest of article at link> I see under the keyword "texting" some previous discussions of this topic. If teens are overusing their phones so much that their health and studies are suffering, parents should take away the phones. In general, a weakness of the rigid age-based school system is that some children, especially in middle school and high school, come to think of age-mates as being the whole universe, making the family and the rest of the community of secondary importance. Teens who need to talk to someone could turn to their parents or siblings instead. In the last millenium, when teenage girls spent a lot of time talking to each other on land-line phones, at least parents could monitor how much time was being spent. They should still do so.

When reading Business Week yesterday I thought of this thread about theater majors. One cannot draw conclusions from one person's career, but maybe a theater major is ok if it combined with a science minor. McGinnis must have taken some science courses to be prepared for a PhD program in environmental engineering. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_12/b4220041560310.htm Innovator: Robert McGinnis of Oasys Water The former Navy diver was dismayed by how much energy it takes to desalinate seawater. So he developed a more efficient process ... After graduating from Yale with a PhD in environmental engineering in 2009, McGinnis co-founded Boston-based Oasys Water and raised $10 million from three venture capital firms to commercialize the technology, including developing a thin membrane suitable for forward osmosis. Oasys plans to start taking orders in late 2011. "Forward osmosis is on the verge of becoming a buzzword," says Tom Pankratz, director of the International Desalination Assn. "Oasys has a clever approach. ... It could potentially be used not only for seawater desalination but also treating wastewater." McGinnis didn't plan to dedicate his career to desalination. As an undergraduate he majored in theater and wrote "sci-fi coming-of-age think-piece mini-epics," he says. Even then, he spent three nights a week working on desalination experiments, often after late-night play rehearsals. "I just couldn't accept the idea of trading fuel for water," he says.

I don't like the title either, but reading several books of the "Dummies" series has not damaged his self-esteem.

I bought "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Algebra, 2nd Edition" by Kelley for my bright 7yo boy. Overall the explanations look good. But turning to a random page (171) I see this: 'The process of completing the square is like that guy you knew in high school whose parents made him take his cousin to the prom. Sure it was awkward, and neither of them had much fun, but at least the parents knew exactly how the evening was going to end. (After all, this was his cousin, so there was no prospect of post-prom "extracurricular activities.")' Ugh, I was not looking for such "jokes" in an algebra book, and blacking out this section would call attention to it. What would you do? Bless Stanley Schmidt for his "Life of Fred" series. The books are funny but wholesome.

A recent NYT article "CUNY Adjusts Amid Tide of Remedial Students" http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/nyregion/04remedial.html mentioned that many incoming students cannot pass the COMPASS math exam. Sample tests for algebra and pre-algebra are at http://www.hostos.cuny.edu/oaa/compass/algebra_diag.asp . I took the algebra test and think a college-bound student should be able to pass it.

At National Review http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons there is a very disturbing story about what happened in a recent class at Northwestern University taught by J. Michael Bailey. Parents need to think about the moral climate of the universities they will be sending their children to for four years.

Since you are in the San Francisco area, and the Carnegie-Mellon based C-MITES program has test centers in Pennsylvania, could you please explain the process of getting Explore testing done through C-MITES? I would like to have my son take the Explore test, but the primary talent search serving Massachusetts is Johns Hopkins CTY, which uses the SCAT.

Calculus goes with physics, because (for example) in the equation Force = mass * acceleration, acceleration is the 2nd derivative of position with respect to time. A physics student should understand the concept of a derivative.

I think learning Chinese is too hard to make it worthwhile for non-Chinese . I have not tried to do so, but there is an interesting essay "Why Chinese Is So **** Hard" by David Moser, who has: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html . I'll encourage my children to learn Spanish or French.

Some parentss are concerned about having their gifted children progress too quickly through the standard U.S. math curriculum (algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus), because they would not know how to follow up. Others think the standard curriculum misses important topics. There was a series of math textbooks for high school students, the "Annelix Lax New Mathematical Library" (Lax was the editor), that may interest such parents. The titles are listed at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utcah/00387/cah-00387.html and below. Most can be purchased used from Amazon, where they have gotten good reviews. NML 1, Numbers: Rational and Irrational (Niven, Ivan): NML 2, What Is Calculus About? (Sawyer, W.W.): NML 3, An Introduction to Inequalities (Beckenbach and Bellman): NML 4, Geometric Inequalities (Kazarinoff, Nicholas D.): NML 5, MAA Contest Problem Book I (Salkind, G.T.), 1960-1964 and undated NML 6, The Lore of Large Numbers (Davis, Philip J), 1959-1972 and undated NML 7, Uses of Infinity (Zippin, Leo): NML 8, Geometric Transformations I (Yaglom, I.M.): NML 9, Continued Fractions (Olds, C.D.): NML 10, Graphs and Their Uses (Ore, Oystein): NML 11 and 12, Hungarian Problem Books I and II: NML 13, Episodes From the Early History of Mathematics (Aaboe, Asger): NML 14, Groups and Their Graphs (Grossman and Magnus), 1960-1967 and undated NML 15, The Mathematics of Choice: How to Count Without Counting (Niven, Ivan): NML 16, From Pythagoras to Einstein (Freidrichs, K.O.): NML 17, MAA Contest Problem Book II (Salkind, G.T.): NML 18, First Concepts of Topology (Chinn & Steenrod): NML 19, Geometry Revisited (Coxeter and Greitxer): NML 20, Invitation to Number Theory (Ore, Oystein): NML 21, Geometric Transformations II (Yaglom, I.M.): NML 22, Elementary Cryptanalysis (Sinkov, Abraham): NML 23, Ingenuity in Mathematics (Honsberger, Ross): NML 24, Geometric Transformations III (Yaglom, I.M.): NML 25, MAA Contest Problem Book III (Salkind, G.T.): NML 26, Mathematical Methods in Science (Polya, George): NML 27, International Mathematical Olympiads 1959-1977 (Greitzer, Samuel): NML 28, The Mathematics of Games and Gambling (Packel, Edward): NML 29, MAA Contest Problem Book IV (Artino, Gaglione, and Shell): NML 30, The Role of Mathematics in Science (Bowden and Schiffer): NML 31, International Mathematical Olympiads 1978-1985 (Klamkin, Murray), General Correspondence, 1985-1986 NML 32, Riddles of the Sphinx (Gardner, Martin), Galleys, [ca. 1987] NML 33, USA Mathematical Olympiads (Klamkin, Murray): NML 34, Graphs and Their Uses [update] (Wilson, Robin J.), [ca. 1990]

I too have noticed that textbooks have become fatter and more expensive. I'd be interested to know what your favorite math and science textbooks are -- I might buy them used.