About 60 million individuals—roughly 19 percent of the US population—live in rural areas. Rural students graduate high school at higher rates than the national average (90 percent, compared to 87 percent nationally), yet only 19 percent of them go on to obtain a postsecondary degree, below the national average of 33 percent. Fewer rural students enroll in college, and when they do, they are more likely to drop out before obtaining a credential. That’s why Ithaka S+R recently launched the Rural Student Success Network, which aims to support 17 rural-serving institutions in boosting rural student enrollment, support, and workforce outcomes.

The main barrier for these rural students? Proximity, quite literally. Nearly 70 percent of all incoming first-year students enroll within 50 miles of their homes—meanwhile, a tenth of all  Americans live in educational deserts, defined as a local area with zero or only one institution that accepts 80 percent of all applicants. As distance from a postsecondary institution increases, the likelihood of enrolling decreases. With this in mind, the institutions participating in our network have all set explicit goals around strengthening pathways and supports that can make postsecondary enrollment more accessible despite distance.

Yet student support must extend beyond just enrollment. Do rural students feel they belong on campus? Do they have the skills and knowledge to navigate an often complex college bureaucracy to access the resources they need (something our colleagues have termed “college fluency”)? Are their basic needs being met? If they are commuting to campus, do they have reliable transportation? If they’re pursuing their education online, do they have access to (reliable) broadband?

Rural students are also weighing whether a postsecondary degree will allow them to build a future in their communities, or if they need to leave those communities to pursue a career. The value of a credential may thus feel less achievable if local career opportunities are scarce or concentrated in a few sectors. At the same time, rural communities themselves face concerns about outmigration and brain drain, where students who leave to pursue education and careers do not return. Institutions can help address these tensions by connecting programs of study to local and regional workforce needs, something our work with the Rural Student Network institutions emphasizes explicitly.

To best support rural learners as they pursue postsecondary credentials, institutions can follow these best practices:

Educating campus stakeholders and increasing rural awareness

Historically, higher education institutions, especially selective ones, have not focused many resources on recruiting or supporting rural students. In fact, after the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times ran an article titled “Colleges Discover the Rural Student.” One of the key ways that higher education institutions can help rural learners earn degrees is by educating staff and faculty on this population, the structural obstacles they face, and best practices in supporting them. By increasing awareness of rural learners as an identity-based student population on campus, institution stakeholders will be better equipped to understand and support these students’ needs.

Partnering with rural high schools, businesses, and local government

By partnering with rural high schools, businesses, and local government, institutions can co-create pathways into higher education and into the workforce after graduation. Rural communities often have strong relational or social capital and the individuals within those communities are highly interconnected. This is often referred to as “tight-knit” and can be an advantage when creating education pathways because this relational capital has the potential to support a community’s ability to make decisions and enact change more efficiently. For example, Jobs for the Future (JFF) reported that “[t]ight-knit, collaborative rural communities have an advantage over large cities, which often struggle with siloed or disjointed programming across K-12, higher education, and workforce development.”

Institutions can leverage this social advantage by building robust relationships with rural community partners. This can look like collaboratively aligning goals, mapping assets, finances, and other resources, and developing memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with community partners.

Aligning programs with rural workforce needs

A common challenge for rural communities and higher education is that earning a bachelor’s degree can often lead graduates out of their rural communities and into more populated areas. This can effectively disincentivize both rural learners who want to remain close to their community as well as members of the community who witness higher education inadvertently extracting talent and skills from their population. By aligning degrees with rural workforce needs, colleges and universities can demonstrate how rural learners with postsecondary credentials can use their education to serve, support, and invest in their community so that both rural learners and community members see the tangible benefits of degree completion.

Reducing jargon and communicating clearly with rural learners

Academic jargon can create barriers between institutions and rural learners, inhibiting enrollment as well as success. As Sonja Ardoin and Ty McNamee note, academic jargon can create “‘in-groups’ (those who know the language) and ‘out-groups’ (those who are unfamiliar) on campuses, particularly for rural students from poor or working-class backgrounds who often know a completely different set of jargon unrelated to higher education.” These industry-specific phrases are opaque and often confusing. Institutions can communicate more clearly with rural learners by reducing the amount of jargon included in websites and outreach to potential and current students or by creating and sharing jargon dictionaries with new students.

Creating campus connections and community for rural students

Intentionally helping rural students build relationships and community at their new institution is crucial for helping them persist and succeed. Rural students often experience culture shock when arriving on campus and are less likely to have higher education knowledge from their home support network. Due to this, it can be particularly important for them to create connections so that they are better equipped to navigate their new educational environment. Some examples include connecting rural students with peer mentors, advisors, faculty, residential advisors, and rural student groups.

Providing rural-responsive wraparound services

Many groups of students, including rural learners, can benefit from wraparound services or basic needs services such as food, housing, and healthcare. After all, it is difficult to persist in a degree program if you are hungry, unhoused, or navigating a medical issue. Rural learners are more likely to come from poor and working-class backgrounds and so may be in particular need of these types of services. For example, assisting rural students in applying for financial aid and accessing Pell Grant funds may be especially impactful for this population. In addition, transportation support for rural learners, who often do not have access to public transportation, can be crucial to supporting their success. This can look like providing transportation scholarships with funds to cover personal transportation maintenance, gas, and repairs. Or, in instances where there are local transit options, by creating partnerships to align routes with course start times or subsidize bus fare.

Offering place-based transfer options

For rural learners who graduate from community college and are looking to transfer to a four-year institution to continue their education, finding institutions close enough to their home to commute is sometimes a challenge and sometimes simply not possible. One way that institutions can creatively help these students is by forming transfer partnerships that allow students to use the physical spaces and resources of a community college while pursuing their four-year degree with the partner institution online. One example of this is the BOLD (Bachelor’s Through Online and Local Degrees) program offered through Shasta College. As Inside Higher Ed reports, this program “allows students to transfer while staying in place. BOLD students maintain access to Shasta College’s library, computer labs, tutoring and other services—including a reliable internet connection—as they take online courses from one of the California State University campuses or Western Governors University.”

Expanding remote or flexible opportunities for rural access

Since rural learners are often geographically isolated from higher education institutions, one way institutions can reach these students is by bringing courses or programs to the communities in which these students reside. An example of this would be offering certain courses or programs for in-person learning at a building or location within the rural community rather than the traditional route of having students travel to campus. Likewise, offering online and hybrid options increases flexibility and allows students to learn remotely. While broadband internet access can be its own challenge in rural areas, it can also be part of the solution by helping many rural learners attend programs they would not otherwise be able to.

Questions to consider

Rural students face real and substantial challenges when pursuing their postsecondary education; however, institutions have a number of tools to support these learners and improve educational outcomes. As higher education institutions consider best practices and decide where to buttress support for rural students at their own institution, they can also conduct an inventory of the resources their campus already provides:

  • Which offices or departments within your institution are best placed to think about the needs of rural learners? Which institutional stakeholders could be brought into this conversation to draw more attention to rural learners on your campus?
  • Which degrees already offered at your institution would allow a rural learner to get a job within their community? How might these degree programs be promoted in rural communities?
  • What wraparound services does your institution already offer that would benefit rural learners? How could your institution make prospective and current rural students aware of these services?

Through the Rural Student Success Network, Ithaka S+R is working with 17 rural-serving, bachelor-granting institutions to better understand, strengthen, and learn from student success strategies across three areas: adult learner re-engagement, transfer pathways to bachelor’s attainment, and workforce-aligned programs. The network will spend the next few months on shared tools, peer learning, technical assistance, and institution-specific data products to help campuses identify their strengths, prioritize feasible next steps, and connect student success efforts to regional workforce and economic needs. As the project progresses, we hope the lessons generated by participating institutions will offer practical examples that other rural-serving colleges can adapt in their own contexts.