How Much Does Homeschool Cost?
By Sun Kyu Bae |
Published April 15, 2009 |
Articles |
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So, What Are the Dollar Costs of Homeschool?
For those itching to know specific dollar amounts spent on homeschool curriculum, I heard of people homeschooling for $200 to $1,500 per child each year, with costs rising as the child gets into higher grades – take those figures with a grain of salt, because you have total control over your curriculum, which can impact your costs (for example, we can choose to have Ryan and our family visit Korea and just like that, our homeschool costs will have increased by $2,000 for that year, or we could choose to just have Ryan “visit” Korea via the Web, which doesn’t cost anything, except the monthly charges for the Internet).
To get more concrete data on homeschool curriculum costs, there was a national study done in 1996 that indicated average costs of $550 per child per year. Taking inflation into account, I estimate that present day costs of a homeschool curriculum are now approximately $760 per child per year. Not cheap. Of course, thanks to the Internet, you can manage your costs down significantly if you wanted to, and given that most of those folks in that survey purchased pre-packaged curriculum since the Internet barely existed in 1996, the true cost of blending both pre-packaged curriculum with resources on the Internet is probably less than $760, but as a high benchmark, let’s use the $760, knowing that this figure would probably be more of a maximum figure rather than a typical one.
So what if you don’t have $760 per child per year to spend on homeschool? Should you just pack it up and close shop? Fortunately, the answer is no.
Based on a study conducted in 1998 by Dr. Lawrence Rudner, with the College of Library and Information Services, University of Maryland in College Park, eighth grade students whose parents spent $199 or less on homeschool per child per year scored in the 80th percentile on nationally standardized achievement tests. Eighth grade students whose parents spent $400 to $599 on home school also scored in the 80th percentile. It wasn’t until parents spent over $600 (remember, this is 1997 dollars, which is around $780 dollars today) that the students notched slightly higher scores, in the 83rd percentile.
The message here is: Unless you have nothing but the highest expectations for your child (we’re talking Ivy League or top tier university), the amount of money spent on homeschool curriculum doesn’t seem to significantly affect student achievement scores.
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