Columbia, Mo. ? Bombarded by choices at a college job fair, Sara Kianmehr quickly found her match: Columbia College, a small, private school that didn’t mind that her transcripts came from her parents.

The college “was the only institution that didn’t have a puzzled look and say, ‘Home-school,’ and ask me a million questions,” the 19-year-old junior said. “There was a big appeal.”

With colleges and universities aggressively competing for the best students, a growing number of institutions are actively courting homebound high achievers like Kianmehr, who took community college courses her senior year of high school and hopes to eventually study filmmaking at New York University or another top graduate school.

The courtship can be as subtle as admissions office Web sites geared to home-schooled applicants or, in the case of Columbia College, as direct as purchasing mailing lists and scheduling special recruiting sessions.

After years of skepticism, even mistrust, many college officials now realize it’s in their best interest to seek out home-schoolers, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

“There was a tendency to kind of dismiss home schooling as inherently less rigorous,” he said. “The attitude of the admissions profession could have at best been described as skeptical.”

Home-schooled students – whose numbers in this country range from an estimated 1.1 million to as high as 2 million – often come to college equipped with the skills necessary to succeed in higher education, said Regina Morin, admissions director of Columbia College.

Columbia College students Kevin Curry, left, and Magdalene Pride work over a problem in their organic chemistry class on the Columbia, Mo., campus. Pride, a home-schooled student, is a freshman who entered the school with 27 credits and earned a full-scholarship for four years' tuition. More colleges are increasing their recruiting of home-school students like Pride.

Such assets include intellectual curiosity, independent study habits and critical thinking skills, she said.

“It’s one of the fastest-growing college pools in the nation,” she said. “And they tend to be some of the best prepared.”

The number of home-schooled graduates enrolled at Columbia College is small – about a dozen out of a full-time undergraduate population that hovers near 1,000.

The school’s admissions standards for home-schooled students are identical to those for traditional graduates – minus the formal transcript requirement. Some colleges and universities, though, continue to require home-schoolers to earn a GED high school equivalency diploma or take subject-specific SAT tests along with the standard requirements.

Magdalene Pride, a first-year Columbia College student, was a beneficiary of the school’s aggressive recruitment of home-schoolers.

After earning more than 50 credit hours through a combination of community college classes near her suburban St. Louis home and online Advanced Placement course, Price was awarded a four-year scholarship to Columbia College that covers the school’s $12,414 annual tuition.

Among those who helped sell her on Columbia College was Kianmehr, a student ambassador who spoke at a college fair Pride attended.

“They’re so open to home-schoolers here,” she said. “No one looks down on me, or treats me different. It’s very accepting.”