Rural high-school students who hope to go on to college face many barriers, and colleges are doing too little to remove those, Sonja Ardoin contends in College Aspirations and Access in Working-Class Rural Communities: The Mixed Signals, Challenges, and New Language First-Generation Students Encounter (Lexington Books).
Ardoin, a clinical assistant professor of education at Boston University, grew up in a small-town, working-class family in Louisiana before earning degrees at Louisiana State, Florida State, and North Carolina State Universities. So she has seen firsthand some of the challenges that the country’s millions of rural high-school students face. Those start, she says, with too little funding from education-policy makers and are exacerbated by college recruiters’ avoiding the rural schools as “not a good return on investment” because they produce few college attendees.
At her high school, she recalls, “we didn’t have anybody to teach us all the courses we needed, and so the state had a consortium of rural schools, and we called in by phone to try to get some of the coursework that other schools have multiple sections of.”
In addition to writing from personal experience, Ardoin surveys many studies on issues confronting rural students, and reports on her own fieldwork. She found that in rural areas lacking an adequate tax base, underfunded schools often have one or no college counselors and too few good teachers. As a result, students there struggle to find dependable information about going to college. Nor do they have access to Advanced Placement courses and other résumé-builders that college admissions offices commonly see as markers of academic preparedness.
In addition, Ardoin says, rural parents often urge their children to pursue “practical knowledge” in preparation for careers in blue-collar or semi-skilled technical jobs, or to stay on the family farm.
What’s more, high schoolers who aspire to travel farther away than to nearby community colleges or regional universities know that, in seeming to contribute to a rural brain drain, they may struggle to fit in when they return for visits.
In recent years, Ardoin says, more college recruiters are visiting rural schools, thinking of them as a sort of niche market. But recruiters, if they are to do their jobs effectively, need to realize how varied rural students are, she says. Whether students live on farms or in towns plagued by substance abuse and other ills, or are from one racial or ethnic group or another, many are from families where no one has previously been to college, often because of poverty.
Many such students worry that colleges, particularly private ones, will dismiss their qualifications, such as those acquired through membership in organizations like Future Farmers of America, or through learning to be proficient at fishing and hunting. That is ironic, says Ardoin, because those activities do teach capabilities that translate well to college: planning, financial management, patience. “Students learn a lot of skills in all kinds of hobbies,” she says.
What students mostly lack, she says, is the “college knowledge” they need to navigate to and within colleges. She blames college and state education officials, who muddle their pitches, brochures, and procedures with jargon and specialized knowledge that not only confuse potential students from rural areas, but also demoralize them.
“Students may think, ‘If I can’t even understand the recruiter, how am I going to go to college?’ "
