GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The sunrise in rural central Michigan reveals a landscape of neatly divided cornfields crossed by ditches and wooded creeks.
But few of the sleepy teenagers on the lumbering school bus from Maple Valley Junior–Senior High School likely noticed this scene on their hour drive to Grand Rapids along the two-lane Highway 66 and Interstate 96.
They were headed from the two villages that make up their tiny school district — Nashville and Vermontville, total combined population 2,404 — to the DeVos Place Convention Center, where 151 colleges and universities had booths set up at a recruiting fair organized by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC.
The students were going to see the recruiters because few recruiters come to see them.
Urban and suburban students may take college recruiting visits for granted, but recruiters rarely go to schools as small or as distant as Maple Valley, which serves fewer than 500 sixth- through 12th-graders.
“When we think about an urban high school, a college recruiter can hit 1,500 students at a time,” said Andrew Koricich, an assistant professor of education at Appalachian State University. “To do that in a rural area, you may have to go to 10 high schools.”
Rural households also have lower incomes than urban and suburban ones, the Census Bureau reports, meaning that rural students are less profitable for colleges — which often have to offer them financial aid.
“People tend to overlook the rural areas. I think it’s kind of disappointing, because some able students could get looked over,” said David Hochstetler, 17, who was one of the students on that school bus.
New research backs this up. Colleges and universities prefer to recruit at high schools in communities where the average family income is above $100,000, while forgoing visits to those where it’s $70,000 or lower, according to a study of 140 institutions conducted by researchers at UCLA and the University of Arizona. They also concentrate disproportionately on private schools. Rural areas usually have neither wealthy families nor private schools.
This anemic outreach is among the reasons comparatively low numbers of high school graduates from rural high schools end up in college the following fall — 59 percent, compared to 62 percent of urban and 67 percent of suburban high school grads, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, which tracks this.
That, in turn, may threaten a broader economy that relies heavily on rural communities and workers, Koricich said.
“Providing greater postsecondary opportunities for rural residents isn’t simply a matter of equity or moral obligation — it’s a matter of continued national prosperity,” Koricich said.
“People tend to overlook the rural areas,” says David Hochstetler, who traveled an hour in a school bus from his rural high school to a recruiting fair in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I think it’s kind of disappointing, because some able students could get looked over.”
Now, with attention newly focused on rural America, and traditional sources of students drying up in a dramatic enrollment decline,colleges and universities with ample money in their recruiting budgets are rediscovering it.
They’ve realized that “selective institutions should have a broader range of representation of types of students related to the types of adults we have in America” — including rural ones — said Patricia McDonough, an education professor at UCLA. “This becomes even more important in the Trump era,” she said, because of the sense of alienation surveys suggest many rural Americans experience. Research conducted by the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, for example, found that people in the most rural areas are twice as likely to feel powerless and marginalized as those in cities and suburbs, and the less education they have, the more alienated they feel.
