The Challenges Rural Students Face After Admission

The federal government’s plan for expanding opportunity in rural America—to the extent there is one—seems to be trade school. Forget college, President Trump says. Build a workforce, and the jobs will come. To rural communities ravaged by restructuring and a public increasingly skeptical of a college degree, the message may sound enticing.

But trade schools alone will not erase the widening rural-urban wealth gap. A bachelor’s degree remains the surest path to the middle class. And rural youth deserve the same opportunities that nonrural youth have, including college.

After the 2016 election, for reasons both commendable and suspect, efforts to get rural kids to college expanded. And they’ve been working: Recent data from the Common App shows that applications from rural youth grew by 15 percent year over year, compared to 6 percent for students from metropolitan areas.

But getting rural students to college is only a very small part of the challenge. Getting rural students through college is a much larger—and more important—issue.

As a former rural K–12 teacher and current college professor, I have found that geography does not just shape college enrollment. It shapes the rest of the college experience, too, from persistence to graduation and beyond. And unless we reduce the barriers rural students face after admission, we may be setting students up for failure and widening a host of economic, social, cultural and political urban-rural divides.

In my book Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges—And What It Costs Them (University of Chicago Press, 2025), I followed rural, first-generation students as they entered, experienced and graduated from a small, elite college. As I found, the challenges they encountered after admission were daunting, often preventing them from realizing the full benefits of a college education.

Some barriers were academic: The public high schools the students had attended were small and, often, poorly funded—especially in comparison to the prep schools many of their classmates had enjoyed. So they weren’t prepared for the science labs, they struggled to participate in seminars, and they didn’t know to attend professors’ office hours. And, because they didn’t see the larger, more systemic inequalities fueling these gaps, students blamed themselves for these challenges.

“I’m just not a math person,” one told me after floundering through his first-year calculus class. What he didn’t say, or didn’t see: Our education funding system disadvantages low-wealth, rural places, leaving many rural students underprepared for college.

Rural students also tend to be less affluent than nonrural students. As a result, they often couldn’t afford many of the hidden costs of college. Some costs, like textbooks and supply fees, kept them from fully accessing the college curriculum: used copies of required texts, the students discovered, may not show up for months.

But the social barriers—the off-campus dinners and spring break trips—were just as important. After all, it’s over 2 a.m. pizzas that you develop the connections that keep you in college and, eventually, lead to jobs and social mobility.

Their classmates and professors also held many rural stereotypes, like assumptions about the ignorance or racism of rural residents. And so the students grew cautious about sharing their rural upbringing with classmates, and they often struggled to reconcile these assumptions with their own experiences. If my home is “backwards,” they wondered, what does that say about my family? About me?

Even the rural students who identified as liberal—and most did—complained about “campus groupthink.”

“If you say something that doesn’t have the right politics,” one student told me, “people are going to jump on you pretty quick.” This silencing prevented debate on issues like gun rights, which, coming from hunting families, the rural students often understood differently than their classmates did. The students also grew frustrated with what they saw as academic snobbery that valued the intellectual over the practical and dismissed the kind of expertise that often mattered most back home, like how to pay a bill or change a tire.

At the same time, they struggled to remain connected with home. They were gaining knowledge and experiences their families couldn’t fathom and often felt caught between home and college socially, politically and culturally. Though they became skilled at navigating these different worlds, they didn’t fully belong in either one. As hometown relationships unraveled and campus relationships never really started, some grew increasingly isolated.

And then came senior year, when they had to plan for life after college. Most had debt—rural students carry a disproportionate amount of college debt—and, because they had to work jobs that paid well during summer breaks, they often didn’t have the internship experiences that boost a résumé. So, while they assumed they’d need to leave rural America and their home communities for work or further studies, they were struggling to do so.

In short, though the students made it to graduation, college was costly for them. And, as they eventually moved to cities—sometimes for jobs that wouldn’t fulfill them and salaries that wouldn’t sustain them—it also proved costly to their rural communities.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. To make college a viable path for rural youth, we—college administrators, philanthropists and policymakers—need to focus more on expanding access to all of college’s opportunities after admission. This means offering scholarships and financial aid that cover the hidden costs of college, like unpaid internships, course fees and transportation. It also means reducing rural students’ isolation on campus, through cohort admissions models, student-led rural affinity groups and student ambassador programs. These might be modeled on other successful initiatives, such as the Rural Areas Student Initiative at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the North State Student Ambassadors at California State University, Chico.

Colleges should also create initiatives that address stereotypes about rural communities among faculty, staff and students. And they should help students of all backgrounds productively engage with political difference.

Finally, legislators and funders should ensure that getting rural kids to college doesn’t drain rural communities. They should invest in jobs for college-educated workers in rural areas. College career offices should develop their rural alumni connections and support rural mentorships, internships and jobs.

Trade school is not the sole answer to rural America’s economic questions. Neither is college admissions. We must also get rural students through college—and help some of them return home.