In winter when the trees were bare, I could see the field of corn stubble from my bedroom window, just beyond the last street of houses a block away. My best friend's father owned the big grain mill on Main Street, one street over in the other direction. I remember a single college recruiter – from one of the nearby state schools – ever coming to my high school. Our high school guidance counselor wrote letters of recommendation and submitted our transcripts if we applied to college but never talked to us about how to decide where to go. The only kids I knew who went out of state for college were in religious schools supported by their conservative denominations.
In this article on a new consortium formed to recruit more rural and small town students to competitive colleges, it's hard to miss the proxies for "poor and working class" students though they never mention class:
Students at 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 among 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 universities and see advertisements for degree programs, students living far away from campuses are “not getting these incidental brushes with higher education,” Betley says.
“They are not seeing the full range of what is available to them,” she explains. “It causes ‘undermatching’; it causes students to prioritize what they know and what their families know as opposed to what is the best fit for them.”
The consortium seems to have been launched in part to sustain enrollment numbers as there are now substantially fewer college-aged young people in the U.S. than a generation ago. With only 50% of rural students going to college, campuses are acting partly in their own self interest in recruiting those they'd ignored in the recent past of robust applicant pools.
And they do seem to be doing things right with pro-active high school visits, summer transition programs, and ongoing support once students enroll.
And still, I'll question why it takes private philanthropy and the support of the often-problematic College Board to create more equitable college access for rural students. No student should have to rely on Khan Academy for high school calculus as students in these partnerships sometimes must.
Rural students' college access should be a public commitment in a country so seeped in rhetorics of meritocratic opportunity.
