The Edge

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.”

As it happens, Klein spoke to me this week from San Diego, where he was attending the annual meeting of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, where he heard a presentation on a creative broadband-access project sponsored by the extension service at Oklahoma State University. It gave portable Wi-Fi-hotspot devices to local libraries, which then offered them to patrons for checkout.

OK, broadband is a start. The bigger question is: Even if rural students are college-ready, will there be college-level jobs waiting for them back home when they graduate? Clearly, colleges aren’t the only organizations that have a role here. But certainly they can play a part. They can do more to ensure that high-school students understand the ways a college education can be used in rural settings. As Klein noted, many agricultural industries today rely on people with knowledge of chemistry and GIS mapping skills, for example. “Those are some serious college-level tools,” he said.

I know there are university leaders out there right now pondering the question of how their institutions can be more relevant in their rural communities. (I had a long conversation on that topic with one of them just last week.) And Klein told me he hoped that the new report “excites some strategies.” So I expect this to be an issue that I and my colleagues continue to mine in the months to come.

Meanwhile, please do me this favor: If you know of interesting efforts to promote broadband access — college-led or tied to higher ed in some way — please send me the information. I’ll share some of the most inventive approaches in a future newsletter.

Quote of the week.

“What I hope the court understands is that behind the legal arguments are 700,000 lives who will be affected, in a damaging and frankly unnecessary way.”

—Janet Napolitano

Napolitano, president of the University of California and a former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, in an EdSource article on the Supreme Court’s pending ruling concerning the legality of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. DACA allows undocumented students and others to remain in the United States; the university is a party to the case.

Following up on the Credential Registry.

After last week’s newsletter on Credential Engine and its attempt to list and classify the hundreds of thousands of academic and other credentials, several readers sent in questions. One is from Mark Lafer, a consultant, who asked what the project was doing about credentials that might have been issued years ago but have since been discontinued. (His university no longer issues his exact degree.) If the registry does not seek discontinued credentials, he said, “some credential holders could be suspected of résumé/CV padding for decades.”

Credential Engine said it has tools to keep track of credentials that get changed over time. As for older credentials, Carrie Samson, communications manager at the nonprofit group, said that while the bulk of the registry now comprises active credentials, “publishing partners always have the option to add previous iterations of a credential.”

I also heard concerns, via Twitter, about the difficulty that sight-impaired users have in reading the registry. Samson said the registry tools are undergoing a thorough review based on users’ experiences to update how the site functions. “Accessibility is a priority for us, she said, “and we appreciate our users bringing their needs to our attention so that we can ensure we not only bring credential transparency to all credentials, but for all users.”

Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you want to follow me on Twitter, @GoldieStandard is my handle.