When Timothy Brayton was in first grade, his exceptional test scores and grades compelled his parents to pull him out of public school and complete his education at home.

Looking back, the Speech sophomore from Lake Villa says at the time he was the exception, not the rule.

“About 80 percent of the kids we knew who were homeschooling were doing it for religious reasons,” Brayton said. “My reasons were completely secular.”

But Brayton’s circumstances are part of a national trend of parents schooling their children at home because of disenchantment with the public school system.

According to a 1999 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 48.9 percent of homeschooled students were pulled from public schools because parents felt they would receive a better education at home.

Unlike Northwestern, where administrators estimate that fewer than 50 homeschoolers apply each year, Patrick Henry College base their curriculum around homeschooled education. The two-year-old school in Purcellville, Va., is the first of its kind: a college with a strict, Christian-based philosophy and demanding curriculum geared primarily toward home-schooled students.

Of approximately 300 students on the campus, only two were schooled exclusively at public or private schools, said Rachelle Bigger, the college’s associate director of admissions.

The school garnered headlines last year when Matthew du Mee, who achieved a perfect SAT score and a 4.0 GPA in high school, rejected schools like Harvard and Stanford to attend Patrick Henry. Bigger said that is characteristic of the school’s appeal.

“Current students speak of the learning atmosphere,” Bigger said. “They enjoy the rigor in the classroom as well as the close relationships with professors.”

Rebecca Dixon, NU’s associate provost for university enrollment, said increased applications from homeschooled students are making this approach to education more widely accepted than in the past.

“It’s acceptable now – as opposed to being looked down upon as some right-wing arena where people pull their kids out of public schools,” Dixon said. “People had a prejudicial view, but that notion is being dispelled.”

Dixon cited statistics that point to home-schooled students as more likely to come from middle-class households and have parents who hold college degrees.

The National Home Education Research Institute estimates the number of homeschooled students is growing at a rate of 7 to 15 percent each year. Although Dixon said NU does not keep exact records of homeschooled students’ attendance at NU, the applicant pool rarely includes a significant number of them.

“We don’t seem to attract very many of them,” she said. “The number applying each year would be small … My guess would be it’s under 50, which is still up from 10 years ago.”

According to Bigger, Patrick Henry has received 36 applications for the 2002-03 school year. Although the school does not keep general records, she said this is a substantial increase over the same period last year and can be attributed to increased attention from students nationwide.

“Campus visits have increased tremendously (since last year),” Bigger said. “And when students visit they usually apply.”

Critics of the college note its restrictive polices, including mandatory same-sex dorms and rules against dating. Brayton says Patrick Henry’s policies deny students what they’ve been missing out on while being homeschooled.

But Brayton, who looked at schools such as New York University and the University of Southern California, said none of the homeschooled students he knew ever had ambitions of higher education.

“Their educational goals were never to get into a university,” Brayton said. “They were, ‘This is what we need to know so we can be like (our parents).

“Being on my own, making my own decisions is the reason I’m in college. Especially for homeschooled kids, it’s their time to get out of the nest. (Patrick Henry is) depriving them of that.”