Small, Rural Colleges Grapple With Their Geography

The route Google Maps recommends if you’re headed to Ferrum College from the west involves what may be the loneliest and most roller-coaster-like stretch of roadway ever to earn a state route number from Virginia. It’s a narrow ribbon of pavement with no center line, a twisting trail you drive imagining that if you go over the edge, weeks could pass before anyone found the wreckage. Only at the other end do you spot a yellow sign that reads, “GPS Routing Not Advised.”

But Jennifer L. Braaten, Ferrum’s president, just laughs if you mention that the college seems remote: “My husband’s a Lutheran pastor. He says, ‘Only God knows where it is.’”

Ferrum is tucked away here in the Blue Ridge foothills for a reason: When the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society established a four-year high school outside the town of Ferrum in 1913, thousands of children in the surrounding mountains were going uneducated. The high school became a two-year college and then, in the early 1970s, a four-year institution.

But when Ms. Braaten became president, in 2002, the student population stood at about 800 — down from 1,100 a decade earlier. “We had multiyear enrollment challenges,” she says. Looming large among them was the college’s location: There was no cell service, for starters, and the hamlet of Ferrum just down the road had almost nothing to offer students. The nearest city, Roanoke, is about 50 minutes away.

Even by the standards of liberal-arts colleges, Ferrum is isolated — in a league with Sterling College, in Craftsbury Common, Vt. (an hour and a half east of Burlington), and Upper Iowa University, in Fayette (an hour from Cedar Falls). But plenty of small institutions in slightly less remote settings face similar challenges. Unlike universities large enough to generate their own critical mass of food, shopping, and entertainment offerings, many liberal-arts colleges find themselves counting the miles to the nearest fast-food outlets and assuring potential applicants that they can get to a city like Chicago, New York, or Washington in only a few hours. The old real-estate saw “location, location, location” can just as easily be applied to colleges.

Indeed, when Sweet Briar College announced last year that it would close — a decision its alumnae succeeded in reversing — one reason administrators cited was the 30-minute travel time to the closest Starbucks, in Lynchburg, Va. Sweet Briar has one of the loveliest campuses in Virginia, with handsome buildings, rolling meadows, and two lakes, but there’s very little in the way of commerce nearby.

“As recently as a generation ago, the utopian small college in a small college town was the way to go for a lot of kids,” says Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges. “Kids now seem to prefer metropolitan colleges. That’s a factor every college in a remote location has to deal with.”

In earlier times, small colleges frequently moved from one town to another in search of healthier enrollments. Pomona College, for example, lasted barely a year in Pomona, Calif., before moving east to Claremont, in 1889. And in 1924, Beaver College moved from Beaver, Pa., a small town west of Pittsburgh, to the suburbs of Philadelphia (it later became Arcadia University). But nowadays hardly any institution could afford to buy a new campus and build classrooms, laboratories, dormitories, a dining hall, and athletics facilities all at once.

Instead, administrators at colleges far from the beaten path make what improvements to their campuses and offerings they can to attract students and faculty members — and tweak their marketing to promote their locations as assets.

‘30 Minutes to McDonald’s’

That’s what Ferrum started doing when Ms. Braaten arrived. After she got a cell tower erected, she went to work on food options, bringing a Subway to the campus and a Papa John’s to the college-operated Mercantile, a short walk from the chapel. A new cafe in the bookstore now serves Starbucks coffee. “We needed some name brands,” she says, to help students from less rural areas feel comfortable.

Name brands alone didn’t get Ferrum to its current enrollment of more than 1,400, but they matter more to students than one might expect. Mary Ann Naso, vice president for enrollment at Wilson College, in Chambersburg, Pa., says she can’t remember ever running into students downtown, where the Franklin County courthouse overlooks a lovely, historic square with a fountain and a couple of local restaurants. Meanwhile, a busy commercial strip not far from the campus is a big draw. “The whole Norland Avenue stretch is a place our students love to go,” she says, naming Chick-fil-A, Chipotle, and Starbucks as popular destinations, along with the combination gas station/fast-food retailer Sheetz.

There’s no such strip anywhere near Pippa Passes, Ky., where the buildings of Alice Lloyd College crowd a narrow valley on either side of Caney Creek. “It’s 30 minutes to McDonald’s,” says Gator Hazelett, who will be a senior next fall. He confers with Paige Werner, a fellow biology major who just graduated, and after some debate they conclude that the nearest Starbucks is two hours away.

At Alice Lloyd, as at a handful of other American colleges, every student has a campus job, and in return tuition is free for most, including students from about 100 Appalachian counties in five states that the college considers its service area. That makes attracting applicants easy, despite the remote location: The college had 6,300 applications for 200 spots in last year’s freshman class, says Joe A. Stepp, the president.

Most out-of-the-way colleges can’t solve their admissions problems by making tuition free, but even for a work college like Alice Lloyd, location can still be a problem. Claude (Lafie) Crum, the vice president for academic affairs, points out another challenge: hiring good faculty members to live so far from almost everything except their colleagues and students (Hazard, Ky., population 5,000, is the nearest city, about 45 minutes away). All but three of Alice Lloyd’s 30 full-time professors, along with a number of staff members, live on the campus, and many eat together regularly at a long table in the middle of the crowded dining hall. Some people enjoy knowing practically anyone they run into, but that kind of lifestyle isn’t for everyone.

“Because it is such an issue, I really try to emphasize the small enrollment and out-of-the-way location in my early phone conversations with potential faculty,” says Mr. Crum. Even so, he says, some people come to visit and are put off by the remoteness. Age may be one factor: “Many of the older faculty candidates like the remote location and the camaraderie on our campus. The interviewees that seem to dislike the location tend to be younger.”

Some disciplines have been harder to hire in than others, for reasons he can’t explain. “I think we had 15 or so candidates for the education position this spring and close to 50 for the speech and theater position,” Mr. Crum says. “Both positions were advertised on the same website on the same day, and the postings were nearly identical. I’m not sure if there are just a lot of people with speech and theater credentials who are out of work compared to other disciplines.” A few years ago, he adds, the college found only five or so candidates interested in a physics job.

And while the college has no ties to any church, President Stepp sees the issue in almost evangelical terms: “You have to have a missionary zeal to want to work here.”

Mentors and Kayaks

The same can be said of many small colleges, and it’s certainly true at Ferrum. Besides improving students’ fast-food and caffeine options, Ms. Braaten, who is retiring this summer, has worked hard to upgrade facilities, with both donations and money borrowed through a U.S. Department of Agriculture program intended to spur economic development in rural areas. She likes to quote a visitor who said Ferrum had gone “from frumpy to fabulous in five years.”

It has also evolved into what the president calls an “applied-liberal-arts college,” keeping the liberal arts at its core but also offering programs in criminal justice, business, and health. In addition to promoting those programs, Ferrum tries “to get the message out that we’re affordable,” Ms. Braaten says. The discount rate — the difference between the sticker price and what the average student pays after grants — is between 48 and 50 percent, right around the national average.

As the college has bolstered enrollment, it has also attracted a surprisingly diverse student population, with more than 40 percent minority students. That’s due in part to word of mouth among a network of alumni and friends of the college in and around Washington, Ms. Braaten says, but the college has also created peer-mentoring programs for black men and women called Brother4 Brother and Sister4 Sister.

Ferrum’s revised marketing emphasizes the beauty of the region and the proximity of Smith Mountain Lake. And the college has expanded its athletics offerings to appeal to more students, adding men’s and women’s lacrosse and women’s wrestling. The admissions office also makes sure potential applicants who come to visit get introduced immediately to a coach, current student, or faculty member. That kind of welcome can be critical. “All these small colleges are built on an experience of intimacy,” says Jake B. Schrum, president of Emory & Henry College, another small Virginia institution that’s not near very much.

Emory & Henry competes for students partly with innovations in its academic program, but also by making its location an asset. The college calls southwestern Virginia “an outdoor wonderland” and offers students an Outdoor Center packed with kayaks and camping gear. Just up the hill from the Outdoor Center is a climbing tower, and the campus backs up to its own nine-hole golf course, overlaid in part by a popular 18-hole disc-golf course.

Wells College, in Aurora, N.Y., isn’t near a city — it’s half an hour from Ithaca — but it too promotes its location. The campus is a stone’s throw from “beautiful Cayuga Lake” and surrounded by what the college’s website calls “vast outdoor recreational opportunities.” Even so, it’s found itself relying more and more on tuition discounting to attract students.

Jonathan C. Gibralter, the president since July 2015, says the discount rate rose to 72 percent for last year’s freshman class and 68 percent for all students. “Families and students are aggressive about appealing financial-aid packages,” he says.

Now the college is working with data gurus from the admissions consulting firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz and expects to bring the discount rate down by five points for this fall’s entering class. The hope is also to increase enrollment, from 600 to 725, in the next five years.

A recent purchase of several Wells commercial properties by an alumna intent on making Aurora a tourist destination will let the college make “strategic investments,” Mr. Gibralter says, among them a new gym floor, turf field, and sustainability center. And the college plans to recruit the kinds of students who have proved more likely to come, and to stay. Data show that those from within 100 miles of Wells are twice as likely to enroll and succeed.

There’s no question that small rural colleges have to work harder than their city and suburban counterparts to recruit enough students — enough of the right students — to remain viable. “You’ve gotta do five, six, seven things at the same time,” says Ms. Braaten. But a good president is “a peddler of hope,” she says. “There’s gotta be hope for the future, rather than a sense of, We’re dying.”

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.