For Rural Students, Going to College is Not Easy

I knew the envelope’s postmark, too: Vanleer, Tennessee—a place with green hills and old tobacco barns and fences that no longer mark much, a place my third graders used to struggle to find on a map, a place that felt, at once, so familiar and so far. It was there that, just out of college, I began my teaching career. I found my way to Vanleer because I wanted a rural teaching job and the school’s principal was willing to hire me; I never imagined that, 10 years later, I’d be college faculty, teaching college kids and studying rural education and, from a distance, watching my third graders graduate.

Over the next few years, every May, the mailman would drop a stack of graduation announcements in my box, and more would appear on Facebook. With the photos were notes about their future plans, comments on the lives that awaited them. They were becoming mechanics, vet techs and linemen, some enrolling at the local community college for the associate degree or trade certificate they’d need. Under their caps and gowns, I could still see my smart, curious eight-year-olds, and I could see these eight-year-olds—and often, their families—in their plans, too.

I also noticed what my kids weren’t doing. Few were going to four-year colleges, and none was headed to an elite school—the kind of school where I was teaching by then.

I had just been hired at Bates College, a small, wealthy, highly selective, private liberal arts college located in the small city of Lewiston, Maine. At Bates, courses are rigorous, extracurriculars are extensive and facilities are state of the art. A career office will edit your résumé, and a tutoring center can help with your math homework. Sometimes there’s even lobster mac and cheese in the dining hall.

So, why weren’t my former third graders enrolling at four-year schools? Why weren’t they going to colleges like Bates? I didn’t question my kids’ plans; their plans were sensible, and the work they would do, valuable. But I wondered whether these plans had been a choice—if they’d had options and what those options were. The resources, the opportunities, the abundances of college were striking, and I wanted all of that—or at least, the possibility of all of that—for my third graders, too.

After a few years of teaching at Bates, though, my questions started to change. Bates seemed far from rural Tennessee—really, far from rural anywhere. Busy streets and crowded apartment buildings surround the campus. Its trees are deliberately placed. The school’s majors wouldn’t be much help in hanging a power line or vaccinating a horse. Its students don’t go four-wheeling, and they wouldn’t know what to do with a turnip green. On warm spring days, when dorm room windows are open and music spills out, it’s not country.

I still wondered why my students hadn’t gone to a four-year college, but now I also wondered, what if they had?

College opportunity and place

College means opportunity, or at least it’s supposed to. Admission is taken as evidence of hard work and talent. Graduation is, theoretically, a chance to cash in on that investment, the opportunity for steady employment and future security. It’s both high school aspiration and national narrative—the stuff of American dreams—and for decades, policymakers and researchers have preached the bene- fits and, increasingly, the necessity of a degree.

Elite colleges occupy a particular place in this narrative: They’re a special destination with the biggest rewards for the best and brightest students. And their benefits are clear. They offer small classes, intensive advising and robust academic support, and unlike many colleges and universities, they boast high retention rates. Their students develop networks, acquire cultural capital, even find spouses. Their graduates are more likely to land good jobs and enter graduate school, and they earn more—over 20% more than graduates of the least selective schools.

But I was beginning to question the “best and brightest” part of that narrative. Not because my new college students weren’t talented and smart and determined—they were. But they were also mostly white and wealthy. And despite rural America making up 20% percent of the U.S. population, they weren’t rural. “Best and brightest” seemed also to signify something about race and class and geography.

The racial and class inequities of higher education are well documented. We know that, for example, 42% of white students enroll in college after high school, but only 37% of Black students and 36% of Hispanic students do. And while enrollment for students from the wealthiest quintile of families nears 90%, it’s less than 40% for those from the poorest. Study after study makes clear why. Students of color and low-income students face barriers throughout the college pipeline: inadequate college advising, rising tuition, shrinking state aid, racially hostile campuses, mounting debt and countless other obstacles and costs. These disparities, though intractable, are widely acknowledged by advocates, political leaders and college administrators, many of whom are working for change.

But so much of this is about who students are and what they have, not where they are or how the latter might shape the former. Geography has mostly been neglected as a factor structuring college access. It shouldn’t be. Where my rural third graders and my not-so-rural college students are from—and where they are going— suggests that place may actually matter a great deal. I was also beginning to suspect that it isn’t just at admission that it matters. Geography might shape it all: who gets a degree, what that degree means, and what that degree costs.

I wanted to know how.

Spatial injustice and college access

Talent is everywhere; opportunity is not—and this may be especially true in rural places. We know that opportunity is unequally distributed across geography. Some places enjoy more resources, like houses with working plumbing or grocery stores with fresh produce, than others. This asymmetry creates what the urban geographer Edward Soja calls “spatial injustice,” a geography of opportunity that marginalizes the residents of many places, both urban and rural.

A variety of factors produce these spatial inequities, including the political and social organization of space, as with, for example, segregation; discriminatory policies and practices, such as redlining; and uneven development, which leads to disparities like health care deserts and digital divides. Spatial injustice usually reinforces racial and economic injustice, such that the opportunities are most limited in places with larger Black and Brown communities and higher poverty levels. Geography also influences residents’ understanding of opportunities. Individuals learn about resources, like jobs and training programs, and the institutions that offer them, like factories and social service agencies, from their local social networks, in everyday conversations with family and neighbors. This information is based on a community’s accumulated experiences with the opportunity structure, and it is deeply influential. It defines values and perceptions—of the “right” decision or the “worthy” goal—and shapes whether and how residents access opportunities.

Studies of spatial inequity tend to focus on urban centers, and few consider the geography of college access and attainment. Yet spatial injustice may profoundly shape college opportunity for students—and for rural students specifically. One way is through local education levels. Parental education is known to predict children’s college aspirations and enrollment, as well as the type and selectivity of the institution that children pursue. College-educated parents understand application processes, financial aid forms and academic requirements, and they’re more likely to expect that their children will attend college, to talk with their children about college and financial aid and to take their children on college visits. But, because degree attainment is unequal across geography, many rural children don’t have college-educated parents, and therefore, they can’t access those parental supports.

Spatial inequities in wealth may also limit rural college attainment. Family income is a reliable predictor of college attendance for students from all geographies. Given the limited job opportunities and reduced salaries of rural places, rural families have lower incomes than nonrural families, forcing many rural students to either forgo college or take the cheapest college path available.

The geographic unevenness of school resources can shape college opportunity, too. Public schools rely on local property taxes for much of their revenue; because many rural communities don’t have the taxable wealth of more affluent metropolitan areas, their schools are often underfunded. Low-income schools are less likely to have resources like qualified teachers, experienced staff, and high-quality facilities that support rigorous academic preparation, an important predictor of aspirations, enrollment and attainment for rural students. Rural districts also face challenges related to sparsity and distance that can compromise quality; many rural schools lack strong postsecondary counseling programs or, in some cases, any counselors at all, and they’re less likely to offer advanced classes.

These disparities extend to higher education. Most U.S. students attend schools within 50 miles of home. According to the sociologist Ruth López Turley, proximity makes attending college “logistically, financially and emotionally easier.” The chance a student will even apply to college increases with each additional school nearby; living close to a college may raise awareness of the benefits of a degree and expand understanding of application processes. Many rural students don’t enjoy this kind of proximity, though, because most colleges and universities are located in more populated, metropolitan locations, while vast swaths of rural America are education deserts. Institution type also varies geographically: rural places tend to have fewer four-year colleges and more two-year schools. And most colleges do little to mitigate the distance, failing to send admissions officials to rural high schools to recruit students.

These spatial inequities—the distance of higher education, the underfunding of rural K-12 schools, the lack of parental education and wealth—undoubtedly shaped college access for my rural third graders. But another factor might have mattered, too, one that raises complicated questions about opportunity and choice: the rural economy.

Producing the “rural disadvantage”

From cotton to coal, rural economies historically centered on the cultivation, extraction and processing of natural resources, relying on industries like agriculture and logging and mining. It was often exploitative work, dependent on the labor of enslaved and poor men and women. Typically, this work marked every aspect of daily life, including children’s expectations for their adult lives—who they would be and what they would do. And mostly, these expectations did not include college, for work was something learned in the fields or the woods or the mines.

Today’s rural economies are diverse. Some sectors are growing, like tourism, clean energy and prisons. Thanks to the pandemic, remote work from rural areas is also expanding. Traditional rural industries, though, are shrinking. Only 10% of rural workers are now employed in the industries that once defined rural economies and structured rural life. Rural work—whether in traditional industries or in newer, service-oriented sectors—is also disproportionately low-wage work, especially for Black and Brown workers, such as jobs picking strawberries or cleaning hotel rooms that don’t leave much to live on.

And fewer and fewer people are left to do this rural work. In rural places where industries are failing and jobs are disappearing, populations are also shrinking. From 2010 to 2020, rural America recorded its first-ever decade-long population decline, with two-thirds of non-metropolitan counties experiencing loss. Much of that loss is due to out-migration, with many rural residents moving to cities, where jobs are more plentiful and better paid. Some, like the sociologists Maria Kefalas and David Carr, argue that rural America is getting hollowed out.

Even with all that change, one thing remains constant: most rural jobs do not require a college degree, whether in a declining rural industry, like farming or mining, or in a growing newer sector, like tourism or prisons. When a degree is necessary, it’s often a professional certification or two-year credential—and indeed, for these degrees, there is no urban-rural attainment gap. Bachelor’s degrees simply aren’t as relevant to rural work.

College, writes the education scholar Michael Corbett, remains “ ‘invisible’ training for invisible jobs in an elsewhere economy”—and this is especially true for four-year degrees. Thus, the decision to pursue one can feel fraught, like a choice between education and home. Therefore, it might also be the spatial asymmetry of the economy—which jobs are available where—fueling the rural-urban attainment gap, with rural young people just calibrating their plans to their local context.

And perhaps this is as intended. Even as rural economies change and restructure, the country remains dependent on its rural industries to feed, fuel, entertain and imprison. These rural industries are economically and politically necessary, and so rural workers are necessary. Rural youth become rural workers; limiting their education keeps them rural and working and cheap. The rural attainment gap, then, is more than an unfortunate statistic; it’s what sustains these industries. Rural youth—my third graders—aren’t supposed to want to go to college.

Those who go

Despite all this, though, some rural students do go to college. This “invisible minority,” as researchers Sarah Schmitt-Wilson and Soo-yong Byun have called them, often pursues a degree for practical reasons—specifically, employment. Those from places marked by poverty and economic decline may be especially motivated to earn a degree, and although some hope to return home after college, most recognize the challenges of finding work there. Their parents often support college aspirations; they may not be able to help with completing applications or navigating admissions, but they can offer more general support, like high expectations and conversations about careers, that promote college-going. Communities, too, can support college-going, with dense networks that expose students to careers and keep students “on track” for college.

Less is known about these rural students’ college experiences. A couple of studies suggest that they face challenges during college, such as difficulty adjusting and shifts in their identities, and they’re disproportionately likely to take on debt. They also have resources to rely on, including families and communities that encourage them to persist. But it’s not clear how they navigate those challenges, use those resources or understand those years. We also know little about their plans after college, how those plans might change as graduation nears, and what their degree means for them and for their families and communities.

So, as much as I wanted to know why my rural third graders weren’t going to college, I also wanted to know about those who do go: What’s college like for them? What’s it like for their parents, the ones with so much at stake in sending them? Did these families make the right choice? How does geography shape college opportunity?

What happens when they get there

For these students—for the nine, rural first-generation students I followed from matriculation to graduation during the course of my research—college was never an assumption. They grew up in rural places tied to industries that didn’t require college, transitioning to economies that won’t need them either. They were surrounded by adults who hadn’t gone to college and by neighbors who questioned whether they should. The postsecondary messaging of their K-12 schools was uneven—“go to college” messages were often coupled with low expectations and little support. Popular media has made an industry out of rural ignorance: rural people are uneducated, the TV shows and movies and news anchors say, and they have little interest in getting educated. Over and over, these students heard that college—especially the elite kind—isn’t a place for rural youth: rural kids stay home, get rural jobs, do rural work.

But these students resisted. Not in the ways so often written about—that is, resisting education—but instead, resisting through education: they went to college. For this group of high-performing, academically savvy students, college was an act of resistance. They were resisting an American economy that, despite restructuring, still depends on poorly compensated rural workers to pick produce, haul freight, clean hotel rooms. They were resisting the cultural messages that support this economy—the messages that tell them that they don’t need a degree, that they shouldn’t want one, that they aren’t meant for anything but this kind of work. And they were resisting an education that is conflicted, caught between its loftier ideals of equality and mobility and its darker charge of vocational sorting.

It’s not just that rural students aren’t expected “to go on and exceed”; there’s a vast economic system dependent on them not going. But these students did. They went to college—and to the kind of college that seemed the strongest guarantee against a lifetime of low-paid, undervalued rural work. And they finished that college, learning all the strategies (hiding, passing, code switching) and using all the resources (family, home, stubborn determination) to graduate.

The costs of that resistance, though, were high. Access was only partial, belonging was often conditional and promises were sometimes empty. They paid an emotional toll, too: loneliness and disappointment but also the pressure of big expectations, the worry of losing an increasingly distant home, the conflict and doubt and questions wrapped up in their rurality. For some, there was also regret—they didn’t want an urban life, after all. And there was fear—it’s too late, and they can’t return. These weren’t just their costs. Their parents felt them, too. These college decisions weren’t uncomplicated for them. There was the anxiety: the practical concerns of loans and bills and FAFSA forms, but also the apprehension that comes with sending a child to a place you don’t know and a world you don’t understand.

And there was the prickly reality that this departure would likely be not just four years but, instead, permanent. Their rural towns would also pay this price in the form of lost human capital, lost tax dollars, lost potential. So college was costly, for these students and for those who love and depend on them.

Research suggests that, as rural youth consider their futures, they face a hard choice: between college, for the opportunities it offers, and home, for its relationships and community. These students felt that tension, too, and four years later, it sometimes seemed as though college came at the price of home. But the students, I notice, never described that decision as a binary choice, even later, as the costs became more real. College was never just about the opportunities—at least, opportunities of the individualistic sort. For them, college was about their parents and their hopes and dreams. It was about stereotypes and the chance to disprove them. And it was about resistance: refusing to participate in rural undereducation and exploitation. College, then, wasn’t only—or even mostly—about them; it was also about their families, their friends and their communities. They went to college for them, too, so that higher education and its opportunities wouldn’t seem so remote. These students weren’t choosing opportunity over home; they were choosing both.

Now, after graduation, they’re doing everything they can to hold on to each. Most of them didn’t get the opportunities they were promised: the shiny résumé, the powerful connections, the “good job” in the city. And they can’t return home: there’s little work for them, and four years away has changed things. But they’re not yet willing to let go of either, and so they’re still holding on, still resisting.

Reprinted with permission from Educated Out by Mara Casey Tieken, published by The University of Chicago Press © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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Mara Casey Tieken is associate professor of education at Bates College. She is the author of Why Rural Schools Matter, published by the University of North Carolina Press, and Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges—And What It Costs Them, published by the University of Chicago Press.