Top colleges aim to boost rural student enrollment

Top colleges aim to boost rural student enrollment By Jon Marcus for The Hechinger Report. Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Commonwealth News Service reporting for The Hechinger Report-Public News Service Collaboration Crowding around a fire pit outside the Amherst College campus center, earnest-looking high school seniors offered fire-building suggestions as intently as if they were taking a final exam. “This is our test of how rural you are, is how good you are at making a fire,” the college’s assistant dean of admissions, Nathan Grove, joked before he finally got the neatly stacked logs to ignite so the group could make s’mores. The occasion was a two-day visit to encourage admitted applicants to enroll — including this particular group of them, from rural places nationwide where top-ranked private colleges like Amherst rarely previously recruited, and for whom this gathering around the fire pit was organized. “I was frankly sort of shocked that they cared about rural students,” said Jack Hancock, a high school senior from rural Milford, Pennsylvania, who had overcome the steep one-in-13 odds of getting into Amherst and was there with his parents to decide if he’d sign up, which he ultimately did. Coaxing rural high school graduates to enroll at some of the nation’s most selective colleges is the next step in a campaign that started three years ago with a push to get them simply to apply. Called the STARS College Network, for Small Town and Rural Students, the recruiting effort was primed with $20 million from a wealthy Missouri-born alumnus and trustee of the University of Chicago, Byron Trott, who was concerned that too few rural students were going to college. While nearly a quarter of the American population is rural, as he was when he’d gone to college, Trott learned, only 3 percent of the students at his alma mater were. That disparity is not unique. Ninety percent of rural students graduate from high school, more than their counterparts in cities or suburbs, according to the U.S. Department of Education. But only a little more than half go straight to college, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports — down since 2016 and lower than the nearly 60 percent of urban and 63 percent of suburban high school graduates who go. Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter. Trott’s foundation has since injected another $150 million into STARS, which has expanded from an initial 16 member schools to 32, including Brown, the California Institute of Technology, Columbia, Dartmouth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley and Yale. With support from that fund, each has agreed to recruit at rural high schools seldom visited by university admissions officers, who a 2019 study found were more likely to show up at higher-income public and private high schools in cities and suburbs. As STARS has built momentum, more than 90,000 rural students applied to its member institutions last year, up 15 percent over the year before, the organization says. Now the work has turned to getting these students to enroll in and graduate from college. “This process is moving into not just the ‘to college’ part but the ‘through college’ part,” said Marjorie Betley, deputy director of admissions at the University of Chicago and STARS’ executive director. That may not be easy. Rural Americans are less likely than those in cities or suburbs to think college actually benefits students and more likely to believe it has a negative effect on political views and personal values, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds. “A lot of people don’t think it’s worth it,” Hancock said of his classmates and their parents. Most who do choose to continue their education go to a community college or the local branch of the state university, he said — not to selective institutions. So deep is this conviction that, when Hancock’s brother went off to a private college last year, his mother, Jodi, ordered the smallest-sized car window decal of the logo, so as not to draw attention. “That’s a rural cultural idea, that you don’t want to put yourself better than anybody,” she said. “We certainly didn’t want to put on airs.” Private colleges can also be hard to afford for rural households, whose median income the U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates is 12 percent lower than the national average, even after accounting for a lower cost of living. “You can sort of tell it immediately when you’re on these tours” of university and college campuses, said the younger Hancock, who drove with his parents to several of them. (He has never flown on an airplane, he said.) “Certain ones would have a lot more higher-wealth suburban people. Maybe they went to private school. They dressed in designer fashions.” Other things that discourage rural high school graduates from going on to college are harder to quantify, said experts, including homesickness and a sense that they don’t belong. Rural students who do end up enrolling are more likely to drop out than their urban and suburban classmates and less likely to make it to graduation than suburban students, National Student Clearinghouse figures show. Olivia Meier has seen two things hold back friends in Chugiak, Alaska, where she’s a college-bound high school senior: “The first is cost, and the second is not knowing what we’re capable of.” Although her school has a 91 percent graduation rate, which is higher than the national average, only 48 percent of its graduates go on to college, state figures show. “A lot of people, they just don’t see it in the cards for them,” said Meier. They think “the schools are too selective for us to be able to get into.” She shared that self-doubt, Meier said — until she heard that someone in the class ahead of hers had been admitted to the University of Chicago. “I was absolutely shocked, because for me those schools were always something far out that wouldn’t necessarily be available to me. It’s really easy to doubt yourself when applying to schools like this,” said Meier, who ended up being accepted to Amherst through early decision. A selective college campus “is a pretty rarefied environment,” said Mara Tieken, a professor of education at Bates College in Maine and the author of “Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges — and What It Costs Them,” who began her own career as a teacher in rural New Hampshire and Tennessee. “No one hunts. No one shops at Walmart. No one listens to country music. So some of the things that would have seemed so familiar to my students would be totally foreign,” Tieken said. Rural students from lower-income families also may not have relatives or friends at home who can help them figure out the complicated application and financial aid process, since the proportion of rural Americans 25 and older with associate degrees or higher is about a third, compared to nearly half in cities and suburbs. That’s among the reasons behind such things as the accepted student day at Amherst. Several STARS member schools pick up the tab for rural prospective and admitted applicants to spend a day or two on their campuses. More than 1,000 students took advantage of that opportunity last year, sitting in on classes and meals, attending social events and sleeping over. College-bound high school senior Catherine Colberg was making s’mores at Amherst’s fire pit, comparing notes with other admitted rural applicants about how small their hometowns are. “This is kind of huge to me,” said Colberg, after touring the campus of about 1,900 students, including its state-of-the-art science building. In St. Joseph, Minnesota, where she lives, she joked, “my school has, like, one test tube that we all share.” That’s not just hyperbole, said Grove, the assistant admissions dean, who also has the new role of coordinator of rural outreach. In fact, he said, rural students he’s m