I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.
Rural students lag in college readiness. What’s the fix? For starters, better broadband.
A report on the state of rural education came out last week, asserting that some schools and places “face nothing less than an emergency in the education and well-being of children.”
Part of that emergency is the low level of “college readiness” in many of these rural districts, which enroll nearly one in five public-school students in the United States.
They had me at “emergency.”
My plan was to use the report, “Why Rural Matters, 2018-2019: The Time Is Now,” from the Rural School and Community Trust, as the basis for some pithy assertions about how policy makers and college leaders have failed when it comes to preparing these 9.3 million young people for the world that awaits them. That fits well with the narrative we hear a lot about how rural America is being left behind. And it jibes with my own sense that this is a brewing crisis, especially after spending time in central New York this summer, talking with ex-dairy farmers at Farm Aid, in September, and hearing news this week of a 24-percent surge in farm bankruptcies.
In the context of college readiness, though, the rural story isn’t that simple. Nor are the solutions.
It’s true that on measures like passing Advanced Placement tests, rural students collectively lag behind — by a lot. On other gauges of college readiness in this report, broadly speaking, they’re ahead.
Here’s some of that data from the rural-education report, plus some figures that the authors (special h/t to Daniel Showalter, an associate professor of mathematics at Eastern Mennonite University) ran for me:
- Collectively, only 9.5 percent of rural students passed at least one AP test. That compares with 19 percent of students in urban districts, 24 percent in suburban districts, and 19 percent of all students.
- The estimated nationwide graduation rate for rural students is 88.7 percent, four percentage points above the national average.
- About 23 percent of rural juniors and seniors take dual-enrollment college courses while in high school, compared with 12.4 percent in urban districts and 14.2 percent in suburban ones.
- Some 46.5 percent of rural students took either the SAT or the ACT, a rate that is substantially the same as for those in other districts.
So where’s the problem?
These national data obscure the local and regional disparities: the rural-high-school graduation rate of 76.5 percent in New Mexico; the AP-passage rate of below 2.5 percent in Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, and North Dakota; the dual-enrollment-participation rate of less than 10 percent in California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Rhode Island.
Bob Klein, one of the authors, said the report is meant to be a “a quick dashboard” for policy makers. It includes state-by-state report cards on college readiness and four other measures, including poverty and educational attainment.
Klein, an associate professor of mathematics and interim dean at Ohio University’s Eastern Campus, told me he also sees the report as a tool for bringing more visibility to educational concerns in these regions. “Very often, rural and urban face the same issues,” he said, but urban districts tend to get a lot more coverage and attention.
For matters like college preparation, one of the biggest obstacles that students still face is a lack of ready and reliable broadband access to the internet. In urban areas, that’s often an issue of cost. In rural areas, it’s often actual access as well. “It’s a huge deal right now,” said Klein, noting that for tests like the SAT and ACT, “a lot of the prep tools are online.”
