My mom bought a house a couple of years ago in an area she didn’t even consider all that rural. I mean, it’s a back road but it’s only a few minutes to a touristy town. She didn’t realize until she was setting up utilities that she couldn’t get cable. She had a satellite for tv but the internet packages are ridiculously expensive so she had a small amount of monthly data. She misses her Netflix!
I would venture a guess that there are lots of rural areas that have limited internet access and unlimited reliable cell plans are very expensive.
“even the smallest cities many of you here on CC scoff at and consider too small and “rural” seem like scary, dangerous places.”
A highlight of my last 100+ college visits was lunch at Wabash College, where I asked some kids at a table I crashed to tell me about college life in small-town Crawfordsville, pop. ~15,000. One of the kids laughed and said he came from such a small town (no stoplight) that he almost didn’t come because he found Crawfordsville so huge and intimidating.
15,000 is NOT rural to me. It probably has fast food, a grocery store and a stoplight and maybe even a Walmart and the people don’t have to drive a half hour or more to gas up their vehicle!
I come from a village of about 1,700 with one full stop light in Michigan.
What I see there is a mixture of the issues people are pointing out.
- A significant percentage of the parents are skeptical of college and don't understand the value of it.
- The average ACT is about 19, which reflects point number 1.
- The parents don't want their kids to move away, and often there is no college close by.
- Even the rare student who has a 30+ ACT and is Valedictorian is very likely to attend the closest college to home. The family is unlikely to see the value in sending them to a nationally recognized school like Michigan or Michigan State.
- Many people there believe that the real money is made in learning a trade.
- Point 5 may be correct if the student who attends college chooses their college major poorly, which is likely.
- Many families are afraid that their student will become a "crazy liberal." This is Red America, and many of them see Blue America as the enemy.
- Many of these people have never been to a college and don't know the first thing about it. This is where D1 sports are helpful. Many of them have gone to Michigan or Michigan State to watch a game. However, many of them don't understand that the Ivy League is even comprised of 8 actual schools that you could go visit and possibly attend. That is totally removed from there experience. My high school has about 80-100 students per class and many years, none of them attend either Michigan or Michigan State. In my memory, I am only aware of one student attending an Ivy.
The point is that there is a different mindset. State U’s should reach out, but the students are largely not prepared to attend a top State U, and in the case of the few that are, there is still a lot of reluctance and skepticism to overcome in many cases.
Our small town is considered semi-rural. We have farms, but this is not an agricultural reason…it’s New England…growing season isn’t really long enough.
We have a community college within commuting distance…5 miles away. We have a couple of four year colleges about 25 miles away in the “city”. It’s about a 40 minute commute.
Many kids from our small HS (graduating classes about 175) go someplace beside the close commutable options. I should add…the community is not a poor one.
My own kids, not farmers, wanted an urban college experience. And both went to urban undergrad schools. I don’t think either will ever live in this small town again.
I grew up on a no-stoplight town of around 5,000 people. We were on our own in the college application process. No college recruiters bothered to come to our school. None.
Rural is where DH’s family is from. Town had a population of less than 200 until recently. (The town was relocated by the USDA and the town annexed additional area as part of the relocation process. Population is all the way to up 260 now.) One stop sign, a gas station and feed store. High school has about 150 students in grades 9-12. Few kids go to a 4 year college–those that do go are either athletes or children of the few professionals who live there. (Teachers’ kids mostly).
The place is a long way from everywhere. The nearest CC is over an hour away over narrow, windy rural roads.
High speed internet access is expensive. (Requires a satellite uplink.) Cell phone data coverage is spotty.
Like Loukydad, I live in a rural area. Kids come from far away even for High school.
I got a bit upset reading some comments along the lines of “just do this, what’s the big deal” (a couple a pages upthread).
For instance, you can’t just “plug into a phone line” - there’s not enough bandwidth for today’s webpages (it was already long in the 2000’s but at least pages didn’t include video, sound, video ads, etc). Not to mention that fewer people have a phone to “plug” into - outside of black spots/no signal areas, you use a mobile phone like everyone else, except working from a phone is not the same as working from a computer and it’s super expensive. Have you tried completing your entire common app on a phone?
Kids without broadband are at a huge disadvantage.
Kids who don’t have a commutable university are at a huge disadvantage because if their parents can’t afford dorms or if they have to pay for college themselves they have no option. Even if there’s a commutable option in terms of distance, icy roads may make it unpractical and dangerous.
Those aren’t the only difficulties - some are mental obstacles. These mental obstacles are internal and external BTW.
Going away is pretty scary. When the big town nearby has 2,800 people you can’t imagine what it’s going to be like on a campus with 30,000 people. You just can’t imagine but it sounds scary. And once you get there, it is disorienting and alienating, even more than for freshmen used to being unknown in a crowd. It can be exhilarating too of course 
. It’s exciting not to be surrounded by just one model of people. (Read Thomson’s Blankets if you think there are fewer cliques - actually read it, period, it’s excellent and very true to life. Anyone who’d grown up in a small town in the Midwest or perhaps new England will relate.)
Other obstacles:
It can be hard to go against the grain (against your parents, your family, your community) or to think out of the box (or we wouldn’t have all these leadership seminars 
).
And yes there are people who don’t want their kids to go to college and ‘get too big for their breeches’, just like in urban areas, and just like in urban areas there are people who are against higher education.
Downplaying these very real obstacles is disrespectful to the kids I know and try to go to college.
I think it’d easier being a motivated top student at an urban school because there are recruiters, nearby CC’s where you can dual enroll. It is very hard to be a good but not exceptional student at an urban school and the environment is really terrible if not traumatic for kids, unlike rural areas which are rarely that unstable. But there are lots of issues at rural schools too: colleges have begun to recognize that and give the same boost/hook to kids from rural areas (especially high schools with limited offerings) as to kids from lower performing schools in urban areas. However it’s not as widespread still so that’s why you’ll see recommendations, for rural kids, to supplement their academics any way they can (to show their suboptimal class schedules weren’t a choice and that they went out if their way to do something about it).
For a poster upthread: No, being the child of professionals who enjoy living in a rural college town doesn’t count as a rural hook. However it does count as geographical diversity.
I love your post, but am struggling with the math.
How can the population be 260, but there are 150 students in grades 9-12?
^ because it’s a district school: students come from many towns.
@Much2learn small towns like that share high schools with other small towns in the area
Very interesting discussion of the federal government’s approach to defining “rural” – https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-classifications/what-is-rural/
“As well stated in the article, disdain toward rural people is indeed the last acceptable form of prejudice in elite circles.”
Oh, come on - there are still plenty of people that people who consider themselves elite feel free to publicly mock. Don’t worry, rural people, you’re not alone! Here are a few of the others that it’s still socially acceptable in certain cultural circles to be disdainful of:
- Smokers
- Overweight people
- Bad Parents *
- Conservatives
Unfortunately, the rural population tends to overlap with many of the aforementioned groups, so they are accorded with an extra heaping of scorn. It’s not personal, you understand, just an unfortunate side effect of those people being so hopelessly uncultured in multiple ways. 
- Just as "rural" is defined as anyone living in any part of the country other than the upper Atlantic coastal areas or Pacific coastal areas, "bad parents" are defined as parents who parent in any way other than the methods utilized by the observer.
I lived in a rural area for 33 years and my kids grew up there. People are talking of a one or two stop light town. Our community had no stop lights, LOL. Six towns fed into one high school. Each HS class had about 150 students in it. A student could conceivably live 25 miles from one of their classmates. About 66% of students went onto 4 year colleges. Our town was not a typical rural town as it was a mix of people such as farmers and blue collar workers and natives of the state, but also many people who grew up and were educated elsewhere (like ourselves) who opted to live there for the lifestyle. Some of these educated professional folks sent their kids away to boarding schools for high school, but we did not. I think my kids got a good education. The colleges they applied to did not visit our high school, except one, Smith. I liked that my kids were not in a competitive atmosphere that I hear about in other parts of the country. My kids had quite successful admissions outcomes at very selective colleges. One landed at Brown (was only kid going to an Ivy in her class) and one landed at a very selective BFA program at NYU/Tisch (our school didn’t even have a drama department). Once in college, my kids tended to be standouts and won various awards and such and were leaders, even though they were primarily mixing with kids who attended private schools, performing arts high schools, or had attended very well regarded public schools. I do believe you can rise up and achieve anything no matter where you go to school. But yes, some of that is if you come from a household that values education. I think the kids at our high school that didn’t go to college likely were from the families where their parents had also not gone to college.
Are we counting stoplights? If so…my town has…4.
Oh, let’s go, country folk, how can we outdo each other? hahaha
It’s 6.7 miles to the nearest gas station for us, 45 minutes to a Target.
We see more deer and bears than humans at our house.
We still have a landline because cellphones don’t work at our house.
We have a well.
The bus for the public high school takes an hour to get there after it picks up where we live (which makes us feel better about our kid’s marginally longer ride to private school.)
The community college is 45 minutes away, and it’s just a branch and we don’t even get the cheapest in-county rate, even though it’s the closest one.
I think the rural hook is overstated. If you look at Yale, for example, they enroll a kid from Wyoming about once every three years.
My dad used to have to fly or get on a boat to leave his community. I believe there were some 14 miles of roads, total. And he was living in the state capital!
I’m sure you all know what state…it blows the rest away in ruralness.
The lack of Yale admissions from Wyoming may be due to lack of applications. My experience growing up in rural Oklahoma was, like many rural areas, that there were no adults that had any knowledge about attending a private college/university. There’s also a common misconception that such schools needn’t be considered because they wouldn’t be affordable…“only rich people attend Harvard”. These factors likely depress the quantity of applications from otherwise well-qualified students to the most competitive colleges.
I think it’s because many of the kids from Wyoming are pretty wealthy and would be full pay at Yale. Hmm, about $12000 at Wyo or $70k+ at Yale? And they LIKE Wyoming.