Home-schooling is rapidly becoming a popular method for alternative education. And with the growing popularity, Iowa’s Regent-run universities have been forced to re-evaluate admission requirements and procedures for these nontraditionally educated students who plan to attend college.

Over a half-million students nationwide are taught at home.

“I never thought I’d see this many families choosing home schooling,” said Mary Terpstra, home-based education coordinator for the Ames School District. Besides her part-time job as liaison between home-educated families and the district, Terpstra home schools her own children.

When she began working with home-schooled families in Ames in 1991, only four children were in the program.

Now Ames has 105 students who are taught at home. Twelve are high-school age.

Terpstra said the number of children who remain in home-schooling programs after the elementary level is on the rise. “One-third are 12-years-old or older.”

Iowa State receives applications for enrollment from about 10 home-schoolers a year, said Phillip Caffrey, associate director of admissions in charge of freshman students. Caffrey said that number is growing.

“A couple of weeks ago, I had three home-school applications in two days,” he said.

He attributes the increase in home-schooled students to a “general dissatisfaction with traditional public schools.”

The reason families choose to teach their kids at home vary. Terpstra said most home-school families say the main advantage of home-schooling is being able to “individually tailor education to each child’s needs.”

Home-schooling is especially effective in dealing with “kids at both ends of the spectrum from attention deficit disorder to talented and gifted,” Terpstra said. “Public schools just can’t meet all the needs of these students.”

While people “from the last of the hippies to the far right are home-schooling,” 75 percent of home-schooled families cite religious reasons, Terpstra said.

These families may object to public school curriculum or teaching methods.

Many new home-school curricula place an emphasis on character development and learning positive values.

“These are things many parents want their kids to have” that are not taught in public school, she said. Because of separation of church and state, public schools should not teach religious values, Terpstra said.

Students who are dual-enrolled, both at home and in public schools, are entitled to the same privileges, facilities and textbooks as other students.

Only 13 of 105 home-schoolers in Ames are not dual-enrolled.

Most of the teen-age home-schoolers in Ames plan to attend college, Terpstra said. Traditional college applications ask students to include class rank, G.P.A., an official high school transcript and ACT/SAT scores.

College admissions advisors evaluate this information and determine whether they will be successful at the college or university they choose.

But because home-schoolers do not have a class rank, high school transcripts or a standardized G.P.A., college admissions advisors must use nontraditional ways of evaluations.

ISU admissions officers place added emphasis on ACT and SAT scores in deciding whether to grant admission to home-schoolers.

“We don’t like to put that much emphasis on [ACT] scores, but we need to see how these students compare to their peers,” Caffrey said. “We ask parents to provide as much documentation as possible about what their child has learned.”

Evaluating this documentation is often difficult and time consuming.

“[Public] high schools have specific requirements like algebra and foreign language. We don’t see typical units from home-schoolers,” he said. From the information provided by parents, “we simply make the best decision we can about how successful the student will be at ISU,” Caffrey said.

Caffrey said he remembers each home-school application because they take so much time to evaluate. He said most of home-schooled students who attended ISU have been successful.

“We try not to put them at a different standard than other students,” he said.

Some home-schooled families are attempting to adapt their curriculum to what colleges and universities want. Caffrey receives frequent requests for ISU’s admissions requirements from home-schooling families.

The requests are “mostly from parents who have middle school-age kids or early high school,” Caffrey said.

Some home-schooled teen-agers take classes at community colleges to build a transcript they can send to a university. Des Moines Area Community College offers night classes at Ames High School.

Some colleges and universities require home-schooled students to earn a General Education Degree (GED) before they are eligible for enrollment.

“Parents are relieved to see that Iowa State does not require this because they do not like the negative connotations that are sometimes associated with a GED,” Caffrey said.

The Iowa Regent Committee on Educational Relations has appointed a sub-committee to develop a set of updated competency requirements for incoming students to the three Regent-run universities.

“Because some schools are modifying curriculum, it is appropriate to review present practices so we are better able to evaluate academic principles,” said Karsten Smedal, ISU director of admissions. “This group is going to try to find out what’s going on in the schools and develop some different methods to assess academic preparation,” he said. Things are a little speculative right now.”

Smedal said new evaluation criteria would benefit home-schooled students and public-school students with nontraditional curriculum.