During her first semester at Southern Methodist University, Savannah Hunsucker went on a retreat with other students enrolled in the Leadership Scholars Program, an event that took them away from the Dallas campus and into rural Texas.
“I remember everyone looking up at the sky and being amazed at the stars and thinking it was so strange,” Hunsucker said.
The stars were a familiar sight to her, having grown up in a small town 30 miles north of Wichita, Kansas. But seeing her classmates in awe of an experience she took for granted made her realize that her rural upbringing was different.
Helping students like Hunsucker feel like they belong at a selective college is STARS College NetworkThe initiative launched in April 2023 with a group of 16 public and private educational institutions working to improve their efforts to attract and retain students who grew up in rural areas. Member universities’ programs include hosting summer learning opportunities and on-campus recruiting events for high school students, placing admissions staff in small-town high schools and using current college students as peer mentors for freshman coming from sparsely populated areas.
This week, the consortium announced it has doubled its membership to 32 universities (see full list below) and that original backer, Trott Family Philanthropies, will donate more than $150 million over 10 years to programs to reach students in more remote areas.
This increased interest comes despite federal data showing 90 percent The percentage of students from rural areas who graduate from high school is About half Most students go directly to college, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
There are many reasons for this, explains Marjorie Betley, executive director of the STARS College Network and associate director of admissions at the University of Chicago. Students at rural high schools may not get adequate counseling about college options or financial aid, or may not be offered classes that selective colleges require of their applicants, such as calculus. College admissions officers may not visit their areas. And unlike many urban and suburban students who occasionally walk or drive by a college and see ads for degree programs, students who live far from campus “don’t have the chance to have casual exposure to higher education,” Betley says.
“They don’t know the full extent of what they’re capable of,” she explains.Undermatching“It causes students to prioritize what they know and what their families know, rather than what’s best for them.”
Plus, some college leaders may not even realize they’re missing out on students from rural areas, Betley said. Definitions of “rural” vary, making this demographic hard to track. But as higher education institutions grapple with predictions that changing demographics and skepticism about the value of degrees will lead to declining enrollment in the coming years, this population may become more of a priority on campus.
Will Gruen, a University of Chicago student who grew up just outside Allentown, Pennsylvania, doesn’t think the lack of an easy way to categorize students from far away is necessarily a problem.
“Sometimes people have a very clear picture in their head of what it means to be ‘rural,'” he says, but for him, it’s important to “recognize that there are many different types of rural communities.”
He argues that education programs should not pigeonhole students from different geographic regions into neat boxes, but rather “expand opportunity to communities that don’t have the information or resources that other school districts have. Less densely populated places often don’t have the same resources that you find in urban areas.”
To fill this resource gap, staff at universities in the STARS network were busy during the consortium’s first year of operation. For example, they visited 1,100 rural high schools in 49 states, often in minivans with a dozen or so admissions officers sharing the road.
The efforts are already paying off: Betley reports that STARS schools have issued more than 11,000 offers to students for the Class of 2028, a 12.9 percent increase over the number of offers made to out-of-town students in the applicant pool last year.
Hunsucker, Gruen and two other students from rural areas described to EdSurge the challenges they faced in attending college and shared the efforts that helped them overcome obstacles.
Digital divide and intimidation
For some students, an early challenge in the college selection process is accessing helpful information about all the options available to them.
As a teenager, Hunsucker worried about how she would fare in college classes: She wanted to attend a college that was “academically rigorous,” but she also “didn’t want to waste my time applying to schools I couldn’t get into.”
“I had no idea where I stood academically,” she says.
Hunsucker’s teachers and guidance counselors encouraged her to only consider in-state universities, she recalled. But she wondered if a private or public school outside of Kansas might be a better fit for her. So she did her own research, watching videos on YouTube where other students explained where they’d been accepted and shared their grades and standardized test scores to get an idea of where to apply. That’s when she applied to Southern Methodist University.
Even after enrolling in college and being accepted into the university’s Leadership Scholarship Program, she wasn’t sure she was ready for classes.
“I was incredibly nervous arriving at SMU and starting classes,” she recalls.
She struggled at first in her macroeconomics classes, but then she started attending office hours and the tutoring center and her confidence grew.
“It can be scary because you don’t know where you stand,” she says, “but if you take advantage of the resources, you’ll be fine.”
For students from out of town, the size of a university can be intimidating. For Blaze Korda, going from a 500-student high school in Montgomery, Alabama, to Auburn University, with its more than 33,000 undergraduate and graduate students, was a “huge shock.”
“It can be overwhelming at times,” he says. “The largest class I ever took in high school was about 30 students. The first chemistry class I took at Auburn University was 230 students.”
“In high school, I knew almost everyone in my graduating class. I could say their names, and we had conversations at some point. But that’s not the case here. You meet someone new every time you walk across campus. You may never see someone again. It’s definitely a huge difference,” Koda adds.
What helped Koda adjust was eventually realizing that “you end up finding your people and hanging out with them a lot,” he said. “You create your own little community, and it feels almost the same as high school.”
Recruitment and Peer Mentoring
What helps these students make the transition from rural high schools to college campuses? Members of the STARS College Network are testing strategies to improve the chances that students will feel safe and have fulfilling lives.
During his senior year of high school, Gruen got a piece of mail that would prove to be a lifeline: He received a flier inviting him to apply to the University of Chicago’s Emerging Rural Leaders summer program for students, both online and on campus. Gruen had never heard of the university before. Overwhelmed by the prospect, he recalls, he waited until the last minute to apply.
In the end, he says, “It was one of the best experiences of my life. I met so many people with diverse backgrounds and interesting perspectives, but who were also very down-to-earth and nice. That’s why I wanted to go to the University of Chicago.”
Participating in the program, supported by the STARS College Network, gave Gruen the opportunity to apply early to colleges during his senior year, which he was accepted and qualified to attend.
He says the pace of life in Chicago is faster than what he’s used to, but adds that the people there aren’t all that different from those back home.
“People often talk about there being a divide between rural and urban areas, but I don’t think that’s as true as people think,” Gruen says.
Now that Avery Simpson will be a senior next year, she is intentionally working to welcome more remote students to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
She came to the school after growing up on what she calls a “farm” – complete with chickens, acres of flowers, and even her own beehives – and she says she spent her first semester feeling “really unsure if this was for me, if I could do this.”
In the city, she missed her family, even though she knew most of her high school teachers, students, and even their parents. As a child, problems with public transportation would take her so far away from campus that she would have to walk back. She couldn’t relate to her classmates, whose parents or grandparents had attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I felt like I overcame little obstacles in my freshman year that other people were already familiar with,” she says.
So when Simpson was searching student job portals during her junior year of college and came across an opportunity to work as a rural peer ambassador through a new campus program, she jumped at the chance. Now she’s part of a small team of students who create free resources to distribute to high schools across Wisconsin, participate in a free text messaging service to answer students’ questions about college, and visit high schools in person to educate teenagers about their higher education options.
She feels it is important to be a role model for them.
“Coming from rural communities, sometimes we forget that we can do what other people can do,” she says. “When I’m in school, I see the impact I’m having on my students and I see myself in them.”
