Tag: International

CROSSVILLE, Tenn. — From the time she was in elementary school, Isabella Cross has dreamed of going to an Ivy League college to become an engineer.

But in her “little no-name town,” as she describes it, selective universities and colleges rarely came to recruit.

As a 17-year-old in rural Tennessee, and the daughter of a single parent, “I always kind of felt, like, I wouldn’t say necessarily trapped, but a lot of kids feel trapped,” Cross said. “And a lot of them never get out. They never get to explore and never get to see other things.”

Now Cross thinks she might get to a top-flight college after all.

Recruiters from some of the nation’s most selective universities — MIT, the University of Chicago, Yale — have, for the first time, come to her “little no-name town,” part of an effort to pay more attention to rural America, where students are less likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to go to college and, if they do, more likely to drop out.

“It kind of just felt like they heard us and they see us and that they know that there’s a need as well for small-town kids like me to have really big dreams,” Cross said.

Rural students graduate from high school at a higher rate (90 percent) than their counterparts in cities (82 percent) and suburbs (89 percent). But only 55 percent go directly to college.

The visit to Crossville was among the first by a new consortium called STARS, or Small Town and Rural Students College Network, prompted by a $20 million grant from a University of Chicago trustee who left a small town in Missouri to create a financial services company and who wants to see more people from backgrounds like his go to and through college.

It follows a long history of neglect of rural areas by many colleges and universities. Not even public research universities recruit in rural places, a study by scholars at UCLA and the University of Arizona found, disproportionately favoring higher-income public and private high schools in major metropolitan areas.

Even when they do find their way to these small towns, recruiters are up against increasing reluctance by students and their families to go to four-year institutions, and especially to campuses far away from home.

Sixteen colleges and universities in all — also including Brown, the California Institute of Technology, Columbia, Northwestern and the University of Southern California — have signed on to STARS and agreed to visit rural high schools in exchange for financial help with travel costs and staffing.

“They’ve never come and taken an interest in us. But the big thing right now is rural, and they’re finally seeing it, I guess,” said Karen Hicks, lead counselor at Crossville’s Stone Memorial High School, who has been an educator in the city for 36 years. “I love it in the sense that it gives our kids opportunities. I hate that they didn’t see it before.”

Related: Rural universities, already few and far between, are being stripped of majors

Rural communities can be hard to reach and often have only small numbers of prospective high school seniors, said Marjorie Betley, senior associate director of admissions at the University of Chicago, who helped organize STARS and serves as its executive director.

“Driving hours and hours on the road to meet with five students, that’s really hard,” said Betley.

But when that trustee, Byron Trott, asked in 2018 how many students at her university came from rural places, as he had, “we couldn’t even answer the question,” Betley said. After further inquiry, she said, “the numbers were not good.” Rural students comprised about 3 percent of enrollment at the time, which she said has since increased to 9 percent. Rural Americans comprise nearly 20 percent of the population, the Census Bureau reports.

Rural students graduate from high school at a higher rate (90 percent) than their counterparts in cities (82 percent) and suburbs (89 percent), according to the U.S. Department of Education. But only 55 percent go directly to college.

That’s a smaller proportion than suburban students. It’s also getting worse, down from 61 percent in 2016, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center says. In Tennessee, the share of all high school graduates who went directly to college last year, though up slightly, was still 10 percentage points lower than five years before.

So rarely do top colleges recruit in rural towns, said Bryan Sexton, a father who came with his son to the college fair in Crossville, that, “you know, when I saw some of the names, I was, like, what are these schools doing here?”

A city of 12,470 named for the spot where an old stagecoach road crossed a onetime cattle drivers’ route between Nashville and Knoxville, Crossville is in the middle of the rocky, heavily forested Cumberland Plateau in the Appalachian Mountains. And it’s a case study in how rural families aspire to, fret about and often decide to forgo college.

Outside the auditorium of the city’s Stone Memorial High School, Nae Evans Sims stopped and thought for a moment about the smallest community she’d ever visited as an admissions recruiter for Case Western Reserve University. “Oh, my gosh,” she said. “Probably this one.”

Alongside representatives from Yale, MIT, the University of Chicago and other institutions, Sims was arranging brochures on a table in anticipation of the kind of college recruiting fair that draws throngs of anxious students and their parents almost every night of the fall in more densely populated towns and cities.

In Crossville, 81 students showed up for the recruiting night, to which students from adjoining towns across the county were also invited.

“My friends in the cities, their kids start talking about college when they’re freshmen,” said Rob Harrison, a city councilmember who stopped by. But in Crossville, he said, “a lot of kids don’t even think about the opportunities out there. It’s just not part of the culture.”

Then again, no one from those elite universities had ever come to Crossville, school officials said, even though the graduation rate from Stone Memorial is 91 percent, school statistics show.

Related: The shuttering of a rural university reveals a surprising source of its financing

Of the students here who choose to continue their education, many simply stick around and go to the community college just across the street, where tuition is free. More than one in 10 enroll in a local trade school, the Tennessee College of Applied Technology, and 4 percent enlist in the military.

That makes Crossville fairly typical of rural places, where residents are less likely to get bachelor’s degrees. Only about 20 percent of people over 25 in rural America (and 15 percent in Crossville) have bachelor’s degrees or higher, compared to 40 percent nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — a gap the Federal Reserve reports has been widening steadily over the last 50 years.

That not only contributes to the worsening divide between urban and rural America; it limits economic opportunity in rural places.

“Whenever a student graduates from high school on a path to create career success, communities benefit from strong workforces and from economic development,” said Noa Meyer, president of rootED Alliance, another STARS partner, which puts college and career advisors in rural high schools. “It’s essential for rural communities to have a skilled and invested workforce. Local businesses need skilled workers.”

Related: A big reason rural students never go to college: Colleges don’t recruit them

But the path to that goal is narrowing. At least a dozen private, nonprofit colleges in rural areas or that serve rural students have closed or announced their closings in the last three years. Public universities in rural parts of Kansas, Arkansas and West Virginia are cutting dozens of majors. Others are merging, including in Pennsylvania and Vermont. Spending on higher education fell in 16 of the 20 most rural states between 2008 and 2018, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

About 13 million people now live in higher education “deserts,” mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away, the American Council on Education estimates.

“There is a significant untapped talent pool in our rural communities, yet rural students often lack access to the resources needed to help set them up for their education, careers and economic stability,” said Trott, founder, chairman and co-CEO of BDT & MSD Partners.

Also as in Crossville, rural students who do go to college generally prefer to stay close to home, research shows.

“Even the ones that have the higher scores, that can survive at some of the more prestigious colleges, they like it here, and they don’t necessarily want to leave,” said Laura Kidwell, another Stone Memorial school counselor. “They want to be within driving distance from home and their family and friends and relatives.”

Aaron Conley is a senior at the high school. He’s deciding between learning heating, ventilation and air conditioning to start his own HVAC business or going to college to study physical therapy or nursing — though both of those fields require “a lot of college. It’s something that I just don’t know if I want to do for a long period of time like that.”

If he does go to college, Conley said, he’d opt for Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, 30 minutes away, so “I can come back and see my family whenever I want.”

Many parents here don’t want their kids to move away, either. Some are concerned that university campuses and faculty in far-flung places are too liberal and not religious enough, Hicks, the school counselor, said. In the surrounding Cumberland County, nearly four out of five voters in the 2020 presidential election cast their ballots for Donald Trump and 71 percent of Tennessee residents consider religion very important to their lives, according to the Pew Research Center, compared to the national average of 53 percent.

“Some of the things that you hear in the news and stuff that happens at different colleges is scary for a conservative family,” Hicks said. Parents think, “ ‘I have control of you now, and I know your environment, and to send you out to that big world is scary.’ ”

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Amy Beth Strong would prefer that her daughter, Ellie Beth, stick around for at least a little while, and maybe start at the local community college after she graduates from Stone Memorial next spring.

“I’m not trying to hold on to them, and I want them to do what they want to do, but I would rather they have a little bit more life experience under their belt,” Strong said, instead of “throwing them out in the middle of the world and saying, ‘Okay, there you go, you’re 18, you’re done. So have at it.’ ”

Some rural parents also worry that their children, if they go far away for college, won’t come back, Hicks said.

Even Harrison conceded that they may be right. “We raise a lot of good kids, and they go off and there’s not a lot to come back to” in a city ringed by soybean, corn and cotton farms and whose main industries include the manufacturing of tile, porcelain, automotive parts and truck trailers.

Some Crossville parents are encouraging their reluctant children to go on to further education, however.

Tina Carr started college, stopping now and then to earn the money she needed to pay for it. But she never graduated.

Only 20 percent of people over 25 in rural places nationwide has a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 40 percent nationally.

“I’ve always regretted not being able to finish,” Carr said, still in her scrubs after commuting home from her job in Knoxville as the front-desk coordinator at a surgeon’s office. “I just see where people get stuck in, it’s a bad word to say, but ‘dead-end’ jobs without a college degree.” And while she likes what she does, she said, “I’ve seen a lot of jobs posted throughout the years that I think I could do, but I can’t because I don’t have that degree.”

That’s why Carr is pushing her daughter, Kira, to continue her education after high school. “I don’t want her down the line to eventually regret that she didn’t go to college” too, she said.

Another major reason fewer rural high school students go to college is the cost. Median earnings in rural areas are nearly one-sixth lower than incomes elsewhere, according to the USDA. In Crossville, the median household income is $40,708, compared to the national median of $74,580. More than 20 percent of the population lives in poverty; 40 percent of the 1,000 students at the high school are considered economically disadvantaged.

Despite their higher graduation rates, rural students also often feel that they don’t belong at top colleges. That, along with homesickness and the cost, is among the reasons those who do go are more likely to drop out than their urban and suburban classmates.

Related: Number of rural students planning on going to college plummets

“We do have rural students come in who have that imposter syndrome, with classmates who took 20 [Advanced Placement courses] and their high school didn’t have any,” said Betley, at the University of Chicago.

At the Stone Memorial recruiting fair, the longest lines were to talk to representatives from the nearby University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Middle Tennessee State University and Tennessee Tech. The shortest was for MIT.

“That’s typically not the MIT experience,” said Carlos Vega, the recruiter from that university. “I go somewhere and I have auditoriums full of students.” In Tennessee, however, two other high schools had told him not to bother coming for scheduled visits, he said, because they didn’t have any students who were interested — a first in his career.

Ellie Beth Strong — she goes by E.B., a nickname given to her by her soccer coach — wonders how comfortable she’d feel at a big or far-off university. Also a senior at Stone Memorial, she has applied to two Christian colleges and the University of Tennessee.

After growing up in a small town, “I don’t want to go to a giant university where I’m just another person that you pass by when you’re going to class,” she said. “I don’t want to have 300 people in my class and have the professor just lecture the whole time. I want to actually get to sit down and talk to the people and get to know everybody.”

Rural students often face cultural differences at universities that mostly enroll people from other backgrounds, said Corinne Smith, an associate director of admissions at Yale who reads the applications of many students from rural places.

“So many students when they get to these campuses, especially when they’re more urban campuses, they have shared challenges,” Smith said.

Related: How to raise rural enrollment in higher education? Go local

Smith is also the advisor to the Rural Student Alliance at Yale, formed five years ago to help rural students feel more of a sense of belonging. When the group was started, she suggested social activities such as apple-picking. But the students instead wanted help getting used to the unaccustomed urban traffic noise outside their dorms or off-campus apartments. “Then they said, ‘Can someone take us on a tour of New Haven so I can see where things are — my town has one stoplight.’ ”

Rural perspectives like these are essential to the diversity of campuses, said Smith, who is working on a dissertation about rural college-going.

“They’ve never come and taken an interest in us. But the big thing right now is rural, and they’re finally seeing it, I guess. I love it in the sense that it gives our kids opportunities. I hate that they didn’t see it before.”

Karen Hicks, lead counselor, Stone Memorial High School

“If you say you want to have a university with a wonderful political science department and then 100 percent of the students in that political science seminar are from urban and suburban towns with the same religious and political affiliation, then are you really having the discussions that we say our institutions are meant to be having?” she asked.

Isabella Cross, the aspiring engineer, has no doubt about what she could contribute to a campus: a small-town sense of community.

“We see you in Walmart? We’re going to stop and talk to you for 45 minutes. We’re going to ask how the kids are. We’re going to ask how your mom is doing. We’re going to ask about all of the things that, you know, sometimes you just don’t get in, like, New York City or whatever larger-scale city that you want to put in there,” she said. “I just think that that’s something that you can bring to a school where it’s definitely a cutthroat competition to get into.”

This story about rural college-going was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Lauren Migaki. Sign up for our higher education newsletter and try out our College Welcome Guide.

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