Ask the expert: Students in rural districts face challenges when applying to college

This time of year can be stressful for the many high school seniors who are in the midst of submitting their college applications as well as for those who have completed their applications and are anxiously awaiting a response from their desired schools.

For high school students in rural parts of the United States, the pace of the college application process can be different. Some of these rural students might not have large numbers of elite universities and colleges coming to admissions fairs in their areas. For others, their school might not offer all the required high school courses to attend some of these schools.

Sheneka Williams is a professor and chair of the Department of Educational Administration at Michigan State University’s College of Education, where she has focused her research on educational leadership and rural education. With an upbringing in a rural school district paired with her tenure of expertise, Williams answers questions about the issues rural K-12 students face when it comes to college and offers some solutions.

How does your own educational journey inform your research?

I grew up in a small town in Alabama, and my experience was different from some of the other Black students, since I came from a family of educators who had gone to college for two generations.

But when I did attend college, I went to a campus that was two times the size of my hometown, which has a population of just 12,000. It takes a confident student and encouragement from parents or mentors to believe you can go to school away from home.

We had some college fairs in high school, but the visiting colleges were state universities and regional schools. You did not have selective schools coming to recruit. Although students can learn about colleges and universities online, there is still the issue that universities need to better connect with rural students.

How are rural high school students’ experiences unique?

Nationally, nearly 10 million students — or 1 in 5 public school students in the U.S. — attended rural schools in the fall of 2022.

Research suggests that rural students finish or complete high school at a higher rate than urban students. While approximately 90% of rural high school students graduated in 2020, 82% of urban high school students got their diplomas that year.

But rural students’ college entrance rates are lower than that of urban and suburban students.

Within four years of graduating high school, 71% of rural students attended college, compared to 73% of suburban and 71% of city students who also went to college, according to 2023 findings by the National Center for Education Statistics.

What explains this trend of lower college entrance rates?

It is important to ask ourselves why rural students finish high school at a higher rate than their suburban and urban peers but attend college at a lower rate.

First, we know that some colleges are not really recruiting students in rural areas. If these universities do not know you exist, and if your parents have not gone to college and do not know how the admission system works, you might not have help as you move closer to attending college. Some rural schools also do not have college counselors.

There are other reasons why some rural high school graduates are not going to college. For example, some students are apprehensive about leaving home. They have close-knit families and communities, and they might be wondering where they fit in at a school in a large place that is much bigger than where they grew up.

Do rural students fit into universities’ recruitment goals?

Only recently have people begun to think and talk more about what rural really means. Some people use the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of rural, which is ‘all population, housing and territory not included within an urban area.’

But that is a somewhat surface definition. It is hard for some scholars to agree on what counts as rural, including me. It feels like something you must experience and know, and that is hard to define. Part of the issue is that rural has been defined by what urban is not, and that makes it seem it does not deserve its own definition.

Universities are starting to think about these rural students more and the challenges they experience in school. That includes not necessarily having stable access to high-speed internet, which approximately 22.3% of Americans in rural areas and 27.7% of Americans in tribal areas do not have, compared to only 1.5% of Americans in urban areas.

Do rural school districts lack courses or resources necessary for college?

Another issue is that even for rural students who want to go to college, they might not have the right qualifications, such as certain completed courses.

I am currently involved in research with sociologist Barbara Schneider and education scholars Joe Krajcik and Clausell Mathis about how some rural high schools in Alabama and Mississippi aren’t able to teach physics or chemistry. Physics and chemistry are both gateway courses to college, and if you want to be an engineer or STEM major, you must complete these courses to have a chance at certain colleges.

Rural high schools tend to have a lack of resources, in both budget and staffing. Schools that cannot find teachers who are qualified or certified in certain subject areas, such as science courses, is a nationwide problem. But this issue is tougher in smaller, rural towns.

Schools will say they do not have students interested in those subjects. But the states also are not requiring that these classes be offered.

This lack of science course offerings can create a whole block of students who are not going to college. And if we are talking about the South, in particular, and states that have a high population of Black students in rural areas, we are talking about a whole swath of students who don’t have this education and would find it a struggle to get into larger, splashier schools that are not near home.

What do you think are some of the solutions to these challenges?

There are many local efforts to offer tutoring and things of that nature for rural high school students. Some of those efforts have been blunted because schools are funded by property taxes, and some of them just do not have the revenue to pay for these add-ons without federal support.

Colleges need to do a better job recruiting students at rural high schools. I also think that once these students make it to college, it would help if there were support or affinity groups.

Some colleges have not thought enough about rural students. I think the narrative around rural students and college needs to shift — these students may want to go to college, but nobody is looking for them. When you live in small, geographically isolated places, sometimes you only know what you see.

Responses and excerpts are from an article published in The Conversation.