^^^True. Wyoming has a lot of rich people because there is no income tax.
And some of those rich people own a lot of land.
My friend does some kind of school financing for one of the Colorado universities. He’s constantly telling me that Colorado funds schools at about $5k per student while Wyo funds at almost $15k per student. This makes him crazy.
Kids from Wyoming who want to go to school OOS are more likely to go to Montana, California, or Washington. The dream school is much more likely to be Stanford than Yale. Just like kids from New England don’t want to go south of NYC for fear of running out of culture (or bagels), kids from the west like it in the west, like skiing, hunting, or kite surfing. We don’t count skiing on ice as skiing.
This isn’t evidence of how much/little Yale values rural diversity. Instead it’s more evidence that Yale gets few qualified applicants from Wyoming. Most people in Wyoming live in urban areas of the state, and the few students that do apply to Yale are especially likely to be concentrated in such urban areas. As I expect others have noted in this thread (I haven’t older pages), rural students who apply to a 4-year college are more likely to apply to state, and less likely to apply to Ivies than average. Maine would be a better example of a state with a high concentration of rural students than Wyoming, and students from Maine are over-represented at Yale.
Yale used to sometimes get 3 students from Wyoming per year. However, more recently there have been few from Wyoming as you noted. This may be random chance, or it may be a changing trend. I expect the primary reason for the low enrollment from Wyoming is they get few applicants from Wyoming. Wyoming is the lowest population state. If students in all states were equally likely to apply to Yale, and admission decision were random, there would be an average of only ~2 students in Yale’s entering class from Wyoming each year. However, students from all states are not equally likely to apply to Yale. Students in the nearby northeast states are far more likely to apply, and students in states like Wyoming are far less likely to apply, which drives the expected number to be much smaller than the ~2 students per class in a random distribution.
When DW told a rural classmate at Purdue that she was studying pharmacy, he replied:
Really? I didn’t know you could major in farmin’.
The town itself is incorporated and has defined boundaries, but the town’s high school is part of a consolidated school district draws students from the entire county–including 3 other small towns – and a few students who live in close-in regions of adjacent counties.
But as DH says, there ain’t much to do in______ except to drink and [begins with s and rhymes with do…] and that’s the reason why the rural branch of the family reproduces approx. twice as fast as the city branch. His cousins–and his cousins kids-- were all were having babies at 15-16-17. Early parenthood and early marriage are a couple more reasons why rural kids are less likely to go to college. There is substantial academic data showing that rural teenagers have much more limited access to contraception than do suburban and urban kids.
Yes, I see those things too. The abstinence approach is not very effective.
The article is right that economies are shifting toward technology, energy, and healthcare that require a college education, but very few rural students are prepared for the rigors of pre-med or engineering.
It seems to me that any push to improve rural college enrollment and success needs to begin in elementary, and middle school, not when it is time to go to college. Then you can prepare them for success in college instead of setting them up for failure. Then you have a good chance to get them to a 23 or 24 ACT. That will improve their odds of college success significantly compared to the 19 ACT average at the rural high school I attended.
While I agree with what you are saying @Much2learn the numbers are more dismal than that here. Local “good” rural districts may be at 19 average, but several are closer to 16 average ACT. And there is really no political will at the state level to improve this. Teachers mostly are not going to choose to go to an underfunded district, be it urban or rural, when they have lots of other options. You could pay people a bonus, but right now at least the money isn’t there.
If the high school is really small, there may only be one math teacher, one science teacher, etc. Get a bad one and you’re screwed. DH’s high school is shown on Niche to have only 27% of students reaching proficiency in math. Add in that the only sports offered are baseball, track and basketball, no AP classes, the possibility of spending 2 hours/day commuting on a bus, and you have students who are going to have a hard time standing out in college applications. The odds are stacked against them even if their parents are supportive or have the money for them to go to a college far from home.
^^^Absolutely agree with this. I taught for 1 year at a rural high school with an enrollment less than 200. I was expected to teach all 4 years of English and drama/journalism, run the newspaper & direct the school play. The school board still complained that I wasn’t certified in another subject (like history or a foreign language) so I could teach that too. In the end I left because the commute was long and I could teach in a school closer home where I only had 2 preps not 5 and fewer outside of class duties.
Also remember that at many rural high schools, the first name of the social studies/math/English/Ag teacher is “Coach” so teaching ability isn’t always the first consideration for hiring.
RE: bonuses for rural teachers. This is an issue in medicine as well. Many states plus the federal government have incentive plans for doctors/dentists who agree to practice in rural areas with a shortage of healthcare practitioners. This program has been around for a couple decades–and has not been particularly effective. People who haven’t grown up in very rural areas don’t like living there–even when they can make more money working there than they can in major cities and their suburbs.
My oldest daughter had planned on a working in a rural healthcare area. She already had a real, in-hand job offer when she graduated from med school (before she even had started her residency) that would pay her substantially more than she could earn in a more desirable area. It was her intent to return and practice there, but she married a man who has his own career and it’s one that absolutely would not be compatible with living in a rural area. So that’s part of the problem–it’s not just attracting talented teachers to rural areas, but also providing jobs for their spouses, who also tend to be more highly educated.
Well, you actually can major in farming subjects at Purdue:
https://www.admissions.purdue.edu/majors/agriculture/index.php
I went from my small rural town to Big State U with 30,000 students. I was one of two from my class. The vast majority of the other students were from the major big city in our state or the suburbs of that city. They sort of mocked my hometown (until I got the grades to graduate summa cum laude :). )
No college recruiters ever came near our high school of about 800 (yes, we drew from other places). Most people went to the local CC.
A few observations:
I had 17 in my graduating class, but we were the biggest class in the K-12 district. One math teacher, one science teacher, etc. That’s 7-12 grade with the same teacher.
I live just a couple miles from a small city, and my internet options are terrible. The only unlimited option is through the phone line and it’s slow and unreliable. I frequently use my phone as a hotspot, which is much faster. In my hometown and the surrounding area that feeds the school it still matters where exactly you live whether you have a good cell phone signal.
My experience, and from what I can see is still accurate, is that the children of farmers and most other business owners go to college. My 70 year old father was in the slight minority farming after not going to college, in my generation and younger it is almost unheard of. The science and business aspects are just too complex.
Unless anyone has data on how many students from Wyoming apply to Yale each year, we’re all just speculating. However, I still think if geographic diversity were truly a hook and an important institutional want, on par with legacies, athletes, first gen, and URMs, Yale admissions would find a way to get more kids from Wyoming to apply. FWIW, the data I saw covered 2008-2016.
Nobody has claimed that. Some colleges probably do like to say that their freshman class is from a large number of states, even if being from a low population state with few highly qualified applicants is not as a big a hook as being a recruited athlete and such. Being the lowest population state, Wyoming is one of the more challenging ones to get a kid from. However, this has little bearing on whether there is a “rural hook” or not.
Yale had student(s) from Wyoming in every year prior to that range, going back to the 90s. As I mentioned in my post, this change in rate over the past few years may be due to random chance, or it may be a changing trend. Other Ivies all had students from Wyoming in greater average numbers in this period. For example, Darthmouth had 3 in 2016, Princeton had 3 in 2015, Cornell, Harvard, and Penn all had 2 in 2014.
@roethlisburger Fair point. It would be interesting to eventually see the applicant data by state.
It seems, the best we have is Yale’s self-reported importance of selection factors. First gen, legacy, ethnicity, and state of residence are all rated as “Considered” in importance. Certainly state of residence is not synonymous with rural, but it may be a reasonable proxy.
That would be awful nice for me, considering I’m from You’ve Never Heard Of It, Idaho.
You need to go deeper than state level to determine whether a student is from an urban or rural area. That said, using census designations, only 2 states have a significant majority of their population in rural areas – Maine and Vermont. Wyoming isn’t in the top 10. When there is a “rural hook”, I’d expect it to be more the kid who brings a unique perspective to the class because of their unique background, which is reflected in their out of classroom activities, awards, and other parts of the application… not just living in Maine or Vermont. For example, there was a poster on this site whose “unhooked” daughter got into Stanford with an 1890 SAT and 1 AP class. The main thing that stood out to me as unique about her background was attending a small, rural high school and placing in multiple state level Future Farmers of America contests (as well as a public speaking event).
There’s definitely posters who claim on here geographic diversity, usually defined as coming from an underrepresented state, represents a significant hook. It’s not a straw man. I suppose we could have a semantic debate on what’s a hook and what’s a tip.
Agricultural land management and agribusiness are major academic subjects. Unless you want to sell your family farm to Cargill or Monsanto, you’d better learn to run it as a modern business. Even so, the economics of farming are not favorable to the family farm.
I live in New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the union. It is also “the Garden State” for a reason. The agricultural college at Rutgers in New Brunswick is part of the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and is a very important focus of the state university system. It’s not just rural states that have a focus on agriculture.
@booajo “While I agree with what you are saying @Much2learn the numbers are more dismal than that here. Local “good” rural districts may be at 19 average, but several are closer to 16 average ACT.”
That is true, and it highlights the massive gap between top public schools and the rest.
In the suburban public school district where my kids attend, the average ACT score is 27. There is no magic to it. The average is so high because they assign a lot of homework and the students do it.
I think parents in rural districts they have no idea that top districts have 5th and 6th graders, who may be no smarter than their kids, who can score a 16 or 19 on the ACT. Like their urban counterparts, many students in rural areas never had a chance. While many parents in rural districts may not care about how far their student is getting behind in school, and why, they should still be told and then at least given an opportunity to make an active decision.