Students like Mattias and Jayadev had been accepted at Iowa State long before PSEO programs and the Iowa Talent Search were in place to keep students moving through the public education system.

Iowa State has a rich history of early enrollment, says Keith Davis, program administrator for the office of pre-collegiate programs for the talented and gifted. In the early days of Iowa State’s history, he says, rural school districts would send their students to Iowa State after the student exhausted the school’s available curriculum.

Davis compares the situation to the one-room schoolhouses of old, with students of all ages learning the same subject at the same time.

“That’s how we used to do it, with students moving through curriculum at their own pace,” he says. “It is only now that we have textbooks that we’ve decided it takes exactly nine months to learn a subject.”

The textbook style of learning creates a group of students with varied abilities in each classroom, making it difficult for teachers to find a level that reaches everyone.

“It’s common to find two years’ span of ability in a classroom,” he says. “That’s a tremendous burden on a teacher.”

Iowa State is still the next step in the educational ladder for students who have advanced beyond the lessons they can learn in secondary education, says Phil Caffrey, associate director of admissions, who handles early entrance candidates.

“Sometimes it’s very challenging for local school districts [to serve a gifted student’s needs]. They can’t design an entire curriculum for that one student, so they depend on the local colleges to meet their needs,” he says.