College Uncovered: The Rural Higher Education Blues

Rural young people who aspire to a higher education have long had fewer choices than their urban and suburban counterparts, contributing to far lower rates of college-going. Now many of the universities that serve them are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors.

That means the already limited number of options available to rural students are being squeezed even further, forcing them to travel even greater distances to college than they already do or give up on it altogether.

Rural students are much less likely to go to college than urban or suburban ones. Twenty-one percent of rural Americans have bachelor’s degrees, compared to 35 percent who live in urban places, a gap of 14 percentage points that has widened from 5 percentage points in 1970, according to the Federal Reserve.

This divide is further widening the gap that’s playing out in politics between rural America and urban and suburban places.

But there are some new attempts being made to help rural students who want to go to college.

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

(Saxophone music)

Jon: We start in the rural Mississippi Delta with the sound of a saxophone performance at the senior recital at Delta State University.

The music department was highly regarded in a part of the country famous for the blues. But since this performance, the university has ended its music program. It also cut English chemistry, math, history, finance, accounting, art and other majors — 21 of them in all, or a third of everything it used to teach.

People in rural America already have far less access to higher education than people in cities and suburbs. Now the comparatively few universities that do exist in rural places are cutting huge numbers of programs and majors.

Kirk: Rural America is also home to many of the private colleges that are already starting to close at an accelerating rate.

This hollowing out of higher education in the heartland has largely gone unnoticed in cities and suburbs.

Jon: But the decline in college opportunity for rural high school graduates is only widening social, economic and political divides between rural America and the rest of the country.

Kirk: So how can we close these gaps? And if you’re a rural student who wants to go to college or a parent, how can you still make that happen?

Jon: This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Jon Marcus from the Hechinger Report.

Kirk: And I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH News. Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate, so GBH …

Jon: … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you

Kirk: In this election season, we’re exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become, and what students and their parents can do to navigate these increasingly turbulent waters.

Today on the podcast: “The Rural Higher Education Blues.”

Maria Fields-Chism: We think a lot about this in terms of, like, financial hardships, but that’s really the least of it.

Jon: Maria Fields-Chism grew up in rural Arkansas.

Maria Fields-Chism: I grew up in a teeny, tiny town.

Jon: But she always wanted to go to college.

Maria Fields-Chism: It was not necessarily important in my family, but it was always important to me, just something that I strove for.

Jon: But the nearest and most affordable option to her ‘teeny, tiny town’ was a public university almost two hours away. So Fields-Chism started at a local community college.

Maria Fields-Chism: There were a lot of barriers even for me to get across town to go to a community college. I was also a young mom, and I would start and I would stop.

Jon: She eventually transferred to that faraway public university, Henderson State. It took her seven years in all to get her bachelor’s degree in English. Then she got her master’s, which is also in English.

Just after she finished the university cut the English program along with math, chemistry, biology, history. That’s two dozen majors students can’t take anymore.

Maria Fields-Chism: On the coasts or in a bigger city, we wouldn’t have these barriers. It becomes a sort of us-versus-them kind of idea. When college seems inaccessible, it sort of adds to that feeling of disenchantment that we that we deal with in small communities, like, I don’t have a voice.

Jon: Today, Fields-Chism teaches seventh and eighth grade in Hot Springs, Arkansas. And she sees even more obstacles confronting her students than she faced.

Maria Fields-Chism: The thing that I think just really stuck with me is that there wouldn’t be another me — another person who grew up in a rural area, made it work, managed to go to Henderson to study English and then gets to graduate and teach English. Because you can’t study English at Henderson anymore.

Jon: So, Kirk, here’s a statistic many people might not know: Rural students graduate from high school at a higher rate than their counterparts in cities and suburbs. But they go to college at a lower rate than suburban students.

Kirk: And that situation has been getting worse, Jon. Just since 2016, the proportion of rural students who enroll in college has dropped even more. They’re also more likely to drop out than their urban and suburban classmates. Researchers say that’s because they feel out of step with campus culture.

Jon: Like Maria Fields-Chism, Dreama Gentry grew up in rural America and was the first in her family to go to college. She went to Berea College in Kentucky, where students work in exchange for their educations. Today, Gentry is the CEO of Partners for Rural Impact.

Dreama Gentry: So I founded the organization because education really was what was the ladder out of poverty. We’re a national intermediary that is focused on ensuring that all rural students have a path to upward mobility.

Jon: That turns out to be a big job.

Dreama Gentry: The first obstacle students face in thinking about higher education is tying it to their aspirations and their dreams and what fulfills them. I’m also coming from Appalachia, which is a region of persistent poverty. So I think when you combine poverty and rural, we’re not instilling in young folks that they can dream and aspire to be anything — that they have possibility and that they can have those dreams.

Kirk: Now, Jon, we should pause and point out here that rural America includes all kinds of people with all levels of incomes. But Gentry is right that cost is even more of a barrier for rural students. In general, median earnings in rural areas are about 20 percent lower than in the rest of the country.

Jon: Right, Kirk. And all these things that make it hard for rural kids to go to college don’t just take a toll on their dreams and aspirations. They have an economic impact. Only about one in five young adults in rural America have bachelor’s degrees or higher. That’s half the national average. And the gap has been widening steadily for 50 years.

Before we move on, let me point out something that we’ve said before on this podcast: Not everybody has to go to college. But somebody does. And that’s become especially urgent in rural places trying to diversify their economies away from mining and agriculture, which can employ only so many people.

Kirk: Okay, so Maria Fields-Chism’s middle schoolers in Hot Springs, Arkansas — they already have a lot of strikes against them. But one of the biggest is that they just don’t have anywhere near as many higher education options as urban and suburban kids do.

Jon: Right. A few big state universities are in rural places, such as Ole Miss, Penn State and Purdue. But the vast majority of rural America is served by regional universities with far fewer resources and much less prestige.

Andrew Koricich: You know, whenever we sort of have these urban- and suburban-centric conversations, we sort of just assume that folks have colleges available to them.

Jon: That’s Andrew Koricich. He heads up the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges and is a professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

Andrew Koricich: That dynamic is so different in rural places. You have fewer types of institutions to choose from. You might have only a community college. You might have a Methodist college that is the only one around you. You might have a four-year public university around. And you might have none of those things around.

Jon: Nearly 13 million Americans now live in higher education deserts, mostly in the rural Midwest and Great Plains, according to the American Council on Education. That means the nearest four-year university is well beyond commuting distance.

Here’s Koricich again.

Andrew Koricich: You know, in a lot of rural places, the idea of choice is sort of a fiction. If you only have one option, you don’t really have choice. It is not just, if this institution doesn’t do it, another one can pick up the slack. If this institution doesn’t do it, it just does not happen. It is not offered. It’s not an option.

Kirk: And that brings us to what’s happening now.

(Sound of protest against program cuts at West Virginia University)

Kirk: At West Virginia University, a plan steered through by President Gordon Gee eliminated nearly 30 programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration.

Jon: Those changes got national attention just because of the sheer number of them. But many other universities and rural places have made equally big cuts.

Kirk: And that includes the places we’ve already mentioned: Delta State and Henderson State, but also Arkansas State, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Youngstown State in Ohio.

Jon: Right. And Emporia State in Kansas, Missouri Western State University, the University of Alaska system. And these aren’t just a few programs here and there that were dropped, Kirk, but dozens. Economics. Sociology. Geography. Biology. Criminal justice. English. History. Philosophy. Political science. …

Kirk: Okay, we get it. We get it. And I know you’ve done a lot of reporting on this issue.

Jon: Yeah. And it’s not just programs and majors being cut. Entire colleges in rural America are disappearing. Sixteen of them have closed just since 2020.

Back at Henderson State in Arkansas, Megan Hickerson taught English for six years until the program was eliminated. There had been warning signs, so she wasn’t entirely surprised.

Megan Hickerson: And I knew the humanities, because the humanities are always under attack these days, right?

Jon: But she was surprised to see some other majors go, such as chemistry, biology and math, and alarmed that history and other subjects got cut.

Megan Hickerson: Not everybody has to study them, but the people who do study them are more likely to have the kind of thinking and critical skills that are really, really important to good citizenship in a free society, a democracy. These cuts are coming at a time when people, including young people, are being bombarded with nonsense. How do they get the skills to pass through that?

Jon: Hickerson still remembers the call from the university’s president telling her she was going to be laid off.

Megan Hickerson: And he just told me that my job was going to be terminated. And I asked him why, you know? And he said because, you know, the numbers don’t support the maintaining the program.

Kirk: A lot of this is being driven by big drops in enrollment made worse by the Covid pandemic. The number of students at Megan Dickerson’s former employer, Henderson State, fell by 28 percent during the pandemic. West Virginia’s enrollment is down by 10 percent since 2015.

Andrew Koricich at Appalachian State says part of the problem is that rural universities don’t have rich supporters to fall back on.

Andrew Koricich: There are a lot of rural institutions that have sort of been struggling for a while, and you drop the Covid pandemic in the middle of that, which, you know, I think we’ve seen documented so many ways that the rural impacts were just qualitatively different than they were in urban areas. On the rural side as well, whether it’s publics or private, nonprofits, you know, they’re not usually the places a lot of wealthy donors think of when they’re getting ready to write a $10 million check.

Kirk: And even though rural voters in swing states get a lot of love every four years from the presidential candidates, they often don’t have much clout with state lawmakers who set the budgets. That’s because there simply aren’t very many of them.

Andrew Koricich: I think some of that is you have so many state reps and senators for each of the major urban areas. But whenever you are a rural-serving public institution, you have one rep and you have one senator and they cover a large geographic area representing a lot of different interests. It is demeaning. It is creating a second class of people to say, ‘You pay your taxes just like everybody else does. You vote like everybody else does. But you just can’t have the same choices as everybody else because there aren’t enough of you here.’

Jon: That double standard is what makes this more than the usual higher education story. It’s contributing to anger and alienation. Rural voters are convinced that their communities get less government spending than they deserve. They don’t believe their kids will do as well as they did. They worry that rural ways of living are being lost and looked down upon. And they blame a lot of this on experts and elites in cities.

Kirk: And that’s not just anecdotal, Jon. That’s according to a survey of 10,000 rural voters. One of the people who conducted that survey was Nicholas Jacobs. He’s coauthor of the book “The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America.” Jacobs grew up in rural Virginia, and now he teaches in another rural state.

Nicholas Jacobs: I’m an assistant professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Jon: So, hey, Kirk — pop quiz. Do you know what the most rural state is, based on the percentage of people who live in rural places?

Kirk: Wyoming?

Jon: Nope.

Kirk: Montana?

Jon: Nope. It’s Maine. I know people might be surprised by that.

Kirk: You spent a lot of your life in Maine, right, Jon?

Jon: I have had the privilege of living in that beautiful state. And, by the way, you know, you lived and worked in the second most rural state — Vermont.

Kirk: Yup. All right. Shout out to Vermont Public.

Jon: So both of us have seen this up close. Smart kids graduate from good schools, but don’t go to college.

We all might have a different idea of what rural means. And that gets back to our earlier caution about being careful to not generalize about who or what is rural. Nick Jacobs makes the same disclaimer.

Nicholas Jacobs: Rural Maine is a lot different than rural Virginia, which is a whole lot different from the rural Southwest. I have a great friend and coauthor on some other work who is a third- or fourth-generation rural Montanan and laughs at my five-acre homestead, because he’s on a 5,000-acre ranch. Rural America, you’re right, is not one thing. It is beautiful. It is complex. And I think that’s why it’s so hard for us to reconcile to the fact that when it comes to politics, we actually can talk about this thing called rural America.

Jon: So Jacobs focuses on what rural people have in common, whatever state they live in.

Nicholas Jacobs: The reason we call the book “The Rural Voter” is because we believe that there are a set of core motivating behaviors or attitudes that do distinguish rural Americans from non-rural Americans.

Kirk: Now, not everyone in rural America is up in arms over cuts by universities to English and foreign language programs. Many schools are focusing on majors that lead directly to local jobs. And that’s okay with some people. At Delta State University, for example, one of the most popular majors is agricultural piloting. That’s a fancy name for a program that teaches students to fly crop dusting airplane.

Jon: Molly Minta is a reporter with Mississippi Today and the nonprofit news outlet Open Campus. She covers the Mississippi Delta and remembers a visit to the local county fair. It’s a Mississippi tradition where politicians come to make speeches.

(Sound of politician speaking) Well, good morning. Glad to be back at the Neshoba County Fair.

Jon: Away from the campaign speeches, Minta met a family that had come to show its prize goats.

Molly Minta: And I was talking to them about how they felt about higher education for their kids. And I had asked the mom of this group — they had three kids with them — if they felt there was any room for, like, character development in college. And she basically just said, ‘Not for my kids.’ She meant that college was career training. Basically college was, you go to get a job.

Jon: Other people Minta met looked at it from a completely different point of view.

Molly Minta: For Black Mississippians from rural areas, college is definitely about opportunity, about helping, you know, get jobs that only degrees can unlock. I want to make that point to kind of complicate a little bit the way we talk about how rural students are viewing college.

Kirk: Still, what’s been happening at rural universities means that the people who do want opportunity have to go farther away to get it.

Molly Minta: What I kind of found was that young people who want opportunities of certain kinds really want to leave. I think that there is a weariness being in a place that doesn’t feel like much is coming that way.

Kirk: And that inevitably affects politics. So let’s circle back to government professor Nick Jacobs.

Nicholas Jacobs: A politics of resentment or a rural politics of grievance is animated by this belief — a very widespread belief — that government resources are not distributed fairly, or that there’s certain biases against rural communities that keep rural communities from getting what they deserve. There are some people in some places that are getting a lot, and you’re not, and your community is not. And that, I think, is a part of the politics of resentment.

Jon: So if you’re a student in a rural high school or a parent in a rural community or just a citizen who cares about closing these divides, what do you do? One thing is to know that there are still opportunities for you, even if it means going a little farther away for college.

Nicholas Jacobs: To me, it’s less about the information that’s actually exchanged and more about the signal and the message you are sending — that when we, as a as an institution of higher education, as an elite college, when we talk about diversity, when we talk about being a welcoming environment and training the next generation of leaders, we mean you.

Kirk: And that’s the idea behind a new project called the STARS Network. It stands for Small Town and Rural Students. STARS was started when recruiters from a few elite universities finally started to visit rural high schools. A wealthy graduate of the University of Chicago gave them $20 million to do it. And he was originally from a small town himself.

Marjorie Betley: We had a trustee, an alum, come to us, and he had just been back to visit his hometown high school in rural Missouri. And he came to us in the admissions office at UChicago. And he said he had a question. And he was, like, ‘How many rural kids do you have on campus? Kids like me?’

Jon: That’s Marjorie Betley. She’s deputy director of admission at the University of Chicago and now the director of STARS.

Marjorie Betley: We couldn’t answer the question. So we worked on, how do we define this? How do we identify students? How do we support students? And we came back with a pretty embarrassing number. It was, like, 3 percent of the entire campus was coming from a rural or small-town high school. And he was, like, ‘You guys should be embarrassed.’ And we were, like, ‘We are. Thank you.’

Kirk: Just 3 percent.

Jon: Yeah. And about 20 percent of Americans live in rural places. But recruiters from selective universities hadn’t historically gone to those communities. A study found that college recruiters favor higher-income, public and private high schools in cities and suburbs. So Chicago and MIT, Columbia, Brown and Yale started to recruit from rural high schools. This year, they’re being joined by Dartmouth, Stanford, Berkeley and others.

Marjorie Betley: We started the conversation with a lot of these schools the same way we got started, which was, ‘How many rural students do you have on campus?’ And every single one was coming back with, honestly, pretty low numbers. So I think that is one of the reasons a lot of schools were, like, ‘We didn’t we didn’t even realize that.’ This was a population we had severely overlooked for a long time.

Kirk: In the STARS Network’s first year, Betley says, participating schools admitted 11,000 rural students, and just under half of them enrolled. If you live in a rural area and want to know more, you’ll find a link to the organization on our landing page.

Jon: But the goal isn’t just to steer rural kids to elite schools.

Marjorie Betley: The idea is kind of planting these seeds really early for students.

Jon: And that could help convince some rural kids to go to college anywhere.

Here’s Andrew Koricich.

Andrew Koricich: Not everybody needs a bachelor’s degree, but pretty much everybody needs something after high school. And I want that something after high school to let the folks who want to stay in their communities stay in their communities. And I don’t want it to be that to get the skills and training you need, it automatically means you have to leave this place you love and that needs you. We need those folks to stay in rural communities.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org, or leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. We just might answer your question on the show.

This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating.

Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor.

Ellen London is executive producer.

Production assistance from Diane Adame.

Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

Theme song and original music by Left Roman out of MIT.

Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks so much for listening.

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 Rural young people who aspire to a higher education have long had fewer choices than their urban and suburban counterparts, contributing to far lower rates of college-going. Now many of the universities that serve them are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors. That means the already limited number of options available to rural students
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