During her first semester at Southern Methodist University, Savannah Hunsucker went on a retreat with the other students enrolled in her leadership scholars program. The event took them away from the Dallas campus and into the Texas countryside.
“I remember everybody looking up and being surprised to see stars in the night sky, and I thought that was so odd,” Hunsucker says.
Stars were a familiar sight for her, having grown up in a small town 30 miles north of Wichita, Kansas. Yet seeing her classmates’ awe at an experience she took for granted made her realize that her rural upbringing set her apart.
Helping more students like Hunsucker feel that they belong at selective colleges is the goal of the STARS College Network. The initiative launched in April 2023 with a group of 16 public and private institutions that committed to improving their efforts at attracting and retaining students who grew up in rural communities. Programs at member colleges include hosting summer learning opportunities and on-campus recruitment events for high schoolers, sending more admissions staff out to high schools in small towns, and tapping current college students to serve as peer mentors to freshmen arriving from places with sparse populations or low density.
This week, the consortium announced that it is doubling its membership — to include 32 colleges and universities (see full list below) — and that its initial benefactor, Trott Family Philanthropies, has committed more than $150 million over 10 years to programs designed to support students from more remote locales.
This growing interest is a recognition of the fact that although federal data shows 90 percent of students from rural regions graduate from high school, only about half 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 deputy director of admissions at the University of Chicago. Students at rural high schools may lack access to adequate counseling about college options and financial aid, or they may not be offered classes that selective institutions look for among applicants, such as calculus. College admissions officers may never visit their communities. And unlike students in many urban and suburban areas who occasionally walk or drive by universities and see advertisements for degree programs, students living far away from campuses are “not getting these incidental brushes with higher education,” Betley says.
“They are not seeing the full range of what is available to them,” she explains. “It causes ‘undermatching’; it causes students to prioritize what they know and what their families know as opposed to what is the best fit for them.”
On top of all that, leaders of some colleges and universities may not even realize they are missing students from rural regions, Betley says, since there are varied definitions of what counts as “rural,” making this demographic difficult to track. But it’s a population that may become more of a priority on campuses as higher education grapples with predictions that demographic changes and skepticism about the value of a degree may lead to declining enrollment in the coming years.
Will Gruen, a student at the University of Chicago who grew up outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, doesn’t necessarily see it as a problem that there is no easy way to categorize students from more-remote areas.
“Sometimes people have a very clear picture in their head of what it means to be ‘rural,’” he says. But to him, “it’s important to realize there are a lot of different types of communities” in rural places.
Rather than sort students from diverse geographic regions into tidy boxes, he argues, for education programs “what it should be most about is extending opportunities to communities that don’t have the information and the resources compared to other school districts. Places that are less population-dense often don’t have the same resources that you would see in the city.”
To start to bridge that resource gap, staff at colleges that have joined the STARS network were busy during the consortium’s first year of operations. For example, they visited 1,100 rural high schools in 49 states, with many trips including a dozen or so admissions officers carpooling in minivans.
The work is already paying off. Betley reports that STARS schools extended more than 11,000 offers of admission to the Class of 2028, which was a 12.9 percent increase over the number of admissions offers made to rural students in their applicant pools last year.
Hunsucker, Gruen and two other students from rural areas explained to EdSurge what challenges they faced getting to college and described the efforts they found helpful in overcoming obstacles.
Information Gaps and the Intimidation Factor
An early difficulty in the college selection process for some students is getting access to helpful information about all the options out there.
As a teenager, Hunsucker worried about how she’d measure up in a college classroom. She wanted to enroll at an “academically rigorous” institution, she says, but also knew that “I didn’t want to waste my time applying to schools I couldn’t get into.”
“I really did not know where I stood academically,” she says.
Hunsucker’s teachers and guidance counselors encouraged students to think only about in-state colleges, she recalls. But she suspected that a private school or public school outside of Kansas might work well for her. So she did her own research, watching videos other students had posted to YouTube explaining where they’d been accepted and sharing their grades and standardized test scores to get a sense of where she might apply. That led her to apply to Southern Methodist University.
Even after she got in — and was accepted to the university’s leadership scholarship program — she wasn’t sure if she was ready for the coursework.
“I was incredibly, incredibly nervous to get to SMU and start classes,” she remembers.
She did struggle early on in a macroeconomics course. But then she started going to office hours and the tutoring center, which bolstered her confidence.
“You’re going to be nervous because you don’t know where you stand,” she says. “But if you take advantage of resources, you will do just fine.”
For students from rural areas, the very size of a university can feel intimidating. For Blaise Koda, going from a 500-student high school in Montgomery, Alabama, to Auburn University, which has more than 33,000 undergraduate and graduate students, felt like “a big shock.”
“It can be overwhelming sometimes,” he says. “The biggest class I ever had in high school had maybe 30 people in it. I walked into my first chemistry class here at Auburn and there were 230 students in it.”
In high school, Koda adds, “I knew pretty much everyone in my graduating class. I could tell you their name and we’d had a conversation at some point. That is simply not the case here. You see a new person every time you walk on campus. You could see someone one time and never see them again. That’s definitely very, very different.”
What helped Koda adjust was realizing eventually that “in the end, you’re going to find your group of people, and you’re going to hang out with them a lot,” he says. “You can make your own little community, and it feels the same, almost, as in high school.”
Recruitment Efforts and Peer Mentors
What would have helped students like these transition from rural high schools to college campuses? Members of the STARS College Network are testing strategies to improve the odds of students feeling comfortable and thriving.
For Gruen, a big help came in the mail one day when he was a junior in high school. He received a flyer inviting him to apply for the Emerging Rural Leaders summer program for students, held both online and on campus at the University of Chicago — an institution he’d never heard of before. The prospect felt overwhelming, he recalls, and he didn’t apply until the last minute.
Turns out, he says, “it was one of the best experiences of my entire life. I met so many people who had such diverse backgrounds and interesting perspectives, while being very down-to-earth, nice people. That’s what made me realize I wanted to go to the University of Chicago.”
Participating in the program — which was supported by the STARS College Network — gave Gruen the opportunity to apply early to the university during his senior year. He was accepted and claimed a spot.
Chicago has a faster pace of life than he was used to, he says, but adds that people in the city aren’t so different from those back home.
“People often say there is a rural-urban divide, but I think that’s not as true as people make it out to be,” Gruen says.
As a rising senior, Avery Simpson is now doing her part to intentionally welcome more students from remote regions to her campus, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Having enrolled at the institution after growing up on what she calls a “farmette” — complete with chickens, acres of flower gardens and her own beehives — she spent her first semester of college feeling like, she says, “I’m really unsure if this is right for me, if I’m going to be able to do this.”
In the city, she missed her family. She missed how she had known most of the teachers in high school, as well as the students and even their parents. She had an early public transportation mishap where she ended up far from campus and had to walk all the way back. She couldn’t relate to classmates whose parents and grandparents had attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I felt like I had all of these little obstacles I was overcoming freshman year that other people were already used to,” she says.
So when Simpson was searching the student jobs portal during her junior year and spotted 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 make free resources to distribute to high schools throughout Wisconsin, participate in a free texting service where they answer student questions about college, and go in person to visit high schools and inform teenagers about postsecondary options.
She finds meaning in serving as a role model for them.
“Coming from a rural community, sometimes we forget we’re capable of doing what other people are able to do,” she says. “When I’m at the schools, I can see the impact I’m making on these students, and I can see myself in these students.”
