What students from rural communities think university leaders should know

This growing interest is a recognition of the fact that while federal data shows 90 percent of students from rural areas graduate from high school, only almost half go directly to college, according to the National Student Research Center.

There are many reasons for this, explains Marjorie Betley, executive director of the STARS College Network and assistant director of admissions at the University of Chicago. Students in rural high schools may lack access to adequate counseling about college options and financial aid, or they may not be offered classes that selective institutions look for in applicants, such as calculus. College admissions officers may never visit their communities. And unlike students in many urban and suburban areas who occasionally walk or drive by colleges and see advertisements for degree programs, students who live far from campuses “don’t have these incidental brushes with higher education,” Betley says.

“They don't see the full range of what's available to them,” he explains. “That leads to…not matching“; causes students to prioritize what they and their families know instead of what is best for them.”

On top of all that, leaders at some universities may not realize they are losing students from rural regions, Betley says, since there are varying definitions of what is considered “rural,” making this demographic difficult to track. But it is a population that may become a priority on campuses as higher education grapples with predictions that changing demographics and skepticism about the value of a degree may lead to declining enrollment in the coming years.

Will Gruen, a University of Chicago student who grew up outside Allentown, Pennsylvania, doesn't necessarily see it as a problem that there's no easy way to categorize students from more remote areas.

“Sometimes people have a very clear idea of ​​what it means to be rural,” he says. But for him, “it is important to realize that there are many different types of communities” in rural areas.

Rather than sorting students from various geographic regions into neat categories, she argues, educational programs “should focus primarily on expanding opportunities to communities that lack the information and resources compared to other school districts. Places with lower population density often don’t have the same resources found in the city.”

To begin to fill that resource gap, staff at the universities that have joined the STARS network were busy during the consortium’s first year of operations. For example, they visited 1,100 rural high schools in 49 states, and many of the trips included a dozen admissions officers carpooling in minivans.

The work is already paying off. Betley reports that STARS schools extended more than 11,000 admission offers to the Class of 2028, which was a 12.9 percent increase over the number of admission offers made to rural students in their applicant pools last year.

Hunsucker, Gruen and two other students from rural areas told EdSurge about the challenges they faced in getting into college and described efforts they found helpful in overcoming obstacles.

Information gaps and the intimidation factor

One of the first difficulties in the university selection process for some students is gaining access to useful information about all the available options.

As a teenager, Hunsucker worried about how he would perform in a college classroom. He wanted to enroll in an “academically rigorous” institution, he says, but he also knew that “I didn’t want to waste my time applying to schools I couldn’t get into.”

“I didn’t really know where I was academically,” she says.

Hunsucker’s teachers and counselors encouraged students to think only about in-state colleges, she recalls. But she suspected that a private or public school outside of Kansas might be a good fit for her. So she did her own research, watching videos other students had posted on YouTube explaining where they’d been accepted and sharing her grades and standardized test scores to get an idea of ​​where she might apply. That led her to apply to Southern Methodist University.

Even after entering and being accepted into the university's leadership fellowship program, I wasn't sure I was ready for the course.

“I was incredibly nervous about arriving at SMU and starting classes,” she recalls.

She initially struggled in a macroeconomics course, but then began attending office hours and the tutoring center, which boosted her confidence.

“You will be nervous because you don’t know where you stand,” he says. “But if you take advantage of the resources, you will do very well.”

For students in rural areas, the size of a university can be daunting. For Blaise Koda, going from a 500-student high school in Montgomery, Alabama, to Auburn University, which has more than 33,000 undergraduate and graduate students, was “a big shock.”

“It can be overwhelming at times,” she says. “The largest class I had in high school was maybe 30 people. I walked into my first chemistry class here at Auburn and there were 230 students.”

In high school, Koda adds, “I knew almost everyone in my class. I could tell you their name and we’d have a conversation at some point. That’s not the case here. You see a new person every time you walk onto campus. You might see someone once and never see them again. That’s definitely very, very different.”

What helped Koda adjust was realizing that “in the end, you’re going to find your group of people and you’re going to spend a lot of time with them,” he says. “You can create your own little community and the feeling is almost the same as in high school.”

Recruitment efforts and peer mentoring

What would have helped students like these make the transition from rural high schools to college campuses? Members of the STARS college network are testing strategies to improve the odds that students will feel comfortable and thrive.

Gruen received a big help in the mail one day when he was a junior in high school. He received a flyer inviting him to apply for the Emerging Rural Leaders summer student program, which was held both online and on campus at the University of Chicago, an institution he had never heard of. The prospect overwhelmed him, he recalls, and he didn’t apply until the last minute.

As it turns out, she says, “it was one of the best experiences of my entire life. I met so many people with very diverse backgrounds and interesting perspectives, and they were all very down-to-earth and nice people. That’s what made me realize I wanted to go to the University of Chicago.”

Participating in the program, which was supported by the STARS university network, gave Gruen the opportunity to apply to college early during his senior year. He was accepted and received a spot.

Chicago has a faster pace of life than he was used to, he says, but adds that the people in the city are not that different from those in his hometown.

“People often say there is a divide between the countryside and the city, but I think that’s not as true as people make it out to be,” Gruen says.

As a high school senior, Avery Simpson is now doing her part to intentionally welcome more students from remote regions to her campus, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Having enrolled at the institution after growing up on what she calls a “small farm” — with chickens, acres of flower gardens and her own beehives — she spent her first semester at the university feeling, she says, “I'm really not sure if this is right for me, if I'm going to be able to do this.”

In the city, he missed his family. He missed the way he had gotten to know most of the high school teachers, as well as the students and even their parents. He had a mishap with public transportation at a young age, so he ended up far from campus and had to walk all the way back. He couldn’t relate to his classmates whose parents and grandparents had attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I felt like I had all these little obstacles I was overcoming in my first year that other people were already used to,” she says.

So when Simpson was searching the student employment portal during her junior year and saw an opportunity to work as a rural peer ambassador through a new campus program, she jumped at the chance. She is now part of a small team of students who create free resources to distribute to high schools across Wisconsin, participate in a free texting service where they answer students’ questions about college, and go in person to visit high schools and educate teens about post-secondary options.

She finds meaning in serving as a role model for them.

“Coming from a rural community, we sometimes forget that we are capable of doing what other people can do,” she says. “When I am in the schools, I can see the impact I am making on these students and I can see myself reflected in them.”