Applications are open for September 2026! 🚀
Applications are open for September 2026! 🚀
It’s one of the questions I’m asked most often by parents.
“Will universities accept my child if they’ve attended an online school?”
Fortunately, this is one of the easier conversations to have.
Yes.
As ÌÇÐÄAPP’s Pathway Advisor, I spend my time helping learners and families navigate everything from university admissions and career exploration to building personalized pathways that reflect each learner’s interests, strengths and long term goals. Conversations like this have become increasingly common as more families explore alternatives to traditional schooling.
Universities around the world accept learners from online schools every year. As long as a learner has completed a recognised qualification and meets the admissions requirements for the course they’re applying to, studying online isn’t, in itself, a barrier to university admission.
In many ways, this part of the process has become much easier to understand than it was when I first started working in university admissions. Universities are generally very clear about their entry requirements, prerequisite subjects and admissions processes. If additional academic rigour is needed, there are recognised ways of demonstrating it through AP examinations, A Levels, Extended Project Qualifications (EPQs), admissions tests and other externally benchmarked qualifications. Standardised tests such as the SAT or ACT continue to play an important role for some universities, while portfolios, interviews and subject specific assessments remain important for others.
The point isn’t that every learner needs to complete every one of these qualifications or assessments. It’s that admissions no longer feel quite so mysterious. We understand the benchmarks, we understand the evidence universities are looking for and, more often than not, we know how to help learners build towards them. With careful planning and enough initiative, meeting minimum admissions criteria is entirely achievable, including for learners studying online.
At ÌÇÐÄAPP, we don’t treat university admissions as something that suddenly begins in a learner’s final year of school. Every learner’s pathway looks different, so we work backwards from where they hope to go and identify exactly what they’ll need to demonstrate along the way. That might include subject selection, APs or A Levels, SAT or ACT preparation where appropriate, EPQs, independent research, portfolios, internships, extracurricular experiences or university specific admissions requirements. There isn’t a single formula because universities don’t all ask for the same things. Our role is to ensure learners are academically prepared while also building a profile that genuinely reflects who they are.
Once admissions becomes a planning exercise rather than a guessing game, it frees us to ask much better questions about education itself.
If we already understand what universities expect academically, how should learners be using the years before university?
I’ve found myself thinking about that a lot recently after reading about changes to higher education policy in the United States. Universities will increasingly be judged, in part, on the earnings of their graduates, reflecting a much stronger emphasis on employability and return on investment than we’ve perhaps been used to seeing.
I wasn’t particularly interested in debating whether the policy itself is right or wrong. What caught my attention was what it seemed to signal. Education, employers and governments are all beginning to look much more closely at what happens after graduation. The conversation is moving beyond gaining admission and towards whether education is preparing people for careers that remain meaningful and sustainable over time.
I don’t think that’s an unreasonable question. The difficulty is that the world learners are entering doesn’t stay still for very long.
For a long time it was possible to become highly specialised, build expertise within a particular profession and expect that knowledge to carry you through an entire career. Today, expertise still matters enormously, but very few professions operate within the boundaries they once did. Engineers work alongside behavioural scientists and designers. Doctors increasingly work with AI systems and data scientists. Lawyers are grappling with emerging technologies that didn’t exist a decade ago. Climate scientists collaborate with economists, politicians and engineers because the problems they’re trying to solve don’t belong neatly to a single discipline. Equally, the specialisation you choose no longer isolates you from the wider context in which you work. Instead, it creates opportunities to engage with adjacent fields, collaborate across disciplines and bring together ideas that might once have remained separate. I find that an exciting shift because some of the most interesting careers are now emerging in those intersections rather than within the traditional boundaries of a single profession.
I’m not sure any specialisation can reasonably be expected to carry someone through the next forty years on its own. The habits we develop alongside that specialisation probably will. Curiosity, paying attention, remaining engaged with what’s happening around us and being willing to keep learning long after we’ve become competent are becoming just as valuable as expertise itself. The goal is no longer simply to produce specialists, but specialists who are comfortable stepping outside their own discipline whenever the problem demands it.
It changes the way we think about the role of high school and how intentionally those years should be used.
High school learners no longer need to wait until graduation before they begin exploring the fields they’re interested in. A learner fascinated by software engineering can begin writing code, building projects and learning from people already working in the industry while they’re still completing their school qualification. A learner interested in psychology can interview practitioners, undertake independent research, volunteer or begin noticing how psychology influences everything from marketing to public policy. The purpose isn’t to race ahead academically or replace university with self-directed learning. It’s to allow curiosity to mature alongside formal education instead of waiting for permission to begin.
The same principle applies after high school. I’ve become much less interested in asking whether university or industry should come first because I don’t think there’s a universal answer.
University still offers something that is incredibly difficult to recreate elsewhere. It creates space to think deeply, to immerse yourself in ideas, to learn from people who have spent decades advancing knowledge and to become part of a network that often shapes careers for years afterwards. We talk much more openly now about the value of university networks than we once did, and I think that’s healthy. The people learners meet there frequently become collaborators, colleagues, mentors and lifelong friends.
Industry develops different capabilities. It teaches context. Ideas stop existing only on paper because decisions have consequences. Customers respond. Colleagues challenge your thinking. You begin to understand how organisations actually function and why certain problems persist despite everyone’s best intentions. There’s enormous value in simply paying attention, being street smart enough to notice where friction exists, honing your intuition by observing why certain people progress, what customers genuinely need and where opportunities naturally emerge. Before trying to change an industry, it helps to understand it well enough to recognise where meaningful change is actually needed.
The more learners I’ve worked with, the more convinced I’ve become that these experiences don’t compete with one another. They’re different chapters of the same education.
The sequence, however, won’t be the same for everyone.
Some learners flourish in academic environments because they genuinely enjoy spending long periods immersed in ideas. They’re patient with complexity, fascinated by difficult questions and quite happy following a line of inquiry simply because understanding something more deeply is rewarding in itself. We still need those people. They become our researchers, scholars and lecturers, expanding knowledge and teaching the generations that follow.
Other learners seem to learn most effectively once their knowledge starts changing something outside themselves. Their understanding deepens through building, contributing, testing and seeing ideas take shape in the real world. For them, earning their first income from a skill, helping solve a genuine problem or contributing to a meaningful project isn’t a distraction from learning. It’s often the point at which learning becomes most powerful.
Neither approach is more valuable than the other; they’re clues to where our jet fuel lies. They tell us where learners naturally gain energy, confidence and momentum, and that’s often where the most thoughtful pathways begin.
Just like the questions learners keep asking, the projects they choose when nobody has assigned one, the people they admire and the environments in which they seem most energised, they help us understand how that learner naturally engages with the world.
I sometimes wonder whether we inadvertently create a hierarchy around ambition as well. We celebrate entrepreneurs, founders and people who want to build the next billion-dollar company, and there’s every reason to celebrate those achievements. At the same time, I hope we never stop celebrating the learner who wants to dedicate their life to scientific research, become an exceptional teacher or spend decades mastering a discipline because they simply love the pursuit of knowledge. I’ve worked with learners whose ambition was to improve access to education in countries where opportunities barely exist, and others whose vision of success was a meaningful career, financial security, a family and enough space for a tennis court one day. None of those ambitions deserve to be ranked against one another. They simply provide different guiding principles from which equally thoughtful pathways can be designed.
So when parents ask me whether universities accept online school students, my answer remains exactly the same.
Yes.
The conversation I’d much rather spend time having with learners and families is how we build an education that continues serving them long after they’ve met the admissions requirements. ÌÇÐÄAPP is increasingly something we can plan for. Understanding the learner is where the real work begins. If we can help young people remain curious, engaged with the world around them and willing to keep learning long after they’ve specialised, we’re giving them something that no qualification can provide on its own: the ability to keep adapting as the world changes around them.
