Rural college readiness: CHE article

[polly_mer]

https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-to-Get-More-Rural-Students/247533/

[Hegemony]

So the article complains that people in rural areas do not go on to college as much, and that there are fewer college-level jobs in rural areas.  But the author doesn't seem to think that these two things may be connected — and that perhaps some students in rural areas are sensible in feeling that they needn't take on debt to get a college degree which will be useless back home anyway. 

This reminds me of a university administrator I was talking to recently, from a state with very rural areas.  She was frustrated that they just couldn't get many from their rural areas to move away from those areas, even to get higher-level jobs, because those people wanted to stay near their families.  She had no doubt that a higher level job was more important than staying near one's family.  I thought maybe those students knew what they valued and maybe those values were just fine as they were.  Not to say that all rural areas are thriving and have sufficient jobs.  But maybe rural people are as able to make good choices about rural options as urban administrators are.

[Hibush]

I live in a rural area with a great patchwork of college going. For one, the area is rich in small and large colleges, so no student has to go very far from home.  The obstacle is more cultural for particular groups of students.


The major obstacle is the lack of models of what college-educated careers look like. The people who went off to college, and would otherwise serve as these models, don't work in the community. The students mainly see those who stayed behind. The lawyers, bankers and other college-educated professionals usually come from somewhere else and are less visible to the high-school students.

Many people assume that rural communities are composed primarily of farm families. That is far from true. Despite the non-forest land use in my county being about 90% agricultural, only 5% of the population works in agriculture or an agriculture-related business. (Farming so so efficient now.) That means many rural students come from families supported by low-wage jobs that do not require a college degree.

Our political leaders generally do not have college educations. They make major policy decisions about the community and determine spending priorities. They have the social capital to get elected. Some have good intentions, some are just warm bodies, some are mindless disruptors. They are hardly model of the value of a college degree to young people (but do make that point for those of us who have seen good government by smart educated people).

The dairies mentioned in the article are a good example of another aspect of the problem. Dairies are going out of business for structural reasons (massive incentives to keep production far above demand, causing prices to be artificially low and almost impossible to make  profit at). The dairies that go first are the ones using technology from ten or more years ago. They often have no college-educated people on the farm who could keep them competitive. Dairies that have people with the technology, genetics and business-planning knowledge one might get from a degree in agriculture are hanging in there. What you see in the news are the ones who are not keeping up, struggling painfully and complaining to reporters.

Other businesses have challenges similar to dairies, though. Whatever business you are in, you compete against the world. (E.g if you have a retail outlet in a rural community, your competition is Dollar General. DG is a very well-managed and well-capitalized national corporation that is executing on a plan for displacing rural retailers.) A college education can help make rural businesses of all kinds more competitive. That competitiveness is critical to the survival of these communities.

[spork]

I agree with Hibush about models and competitiveness. My childhood home was rural with quite a bit of poverty. The closest college campus was an hour's drive away, not that far, but culturally the other side of the galaxy. Dairy producers went out of business soon after WWII. Shoe manufacturing had disappeared before that. The paper mills began shutting down in the late 1980s. The local textile mill closed for good in 2000.

My father, a high school graduate with no college, was on the local school board and a town selectman. Other community leaders were similar. The public school teachers were college graduates, as were the local doctors and dentist, but that was it. There was a lawyer who lived in town with an office about 45 minutes away. All of these folks had moved to the area from elsewhere.

The very few local high school graduates who went off to college, like me, never returned.

[apl68]

I grew up in a rural area with college-educated parents.  Dad originally went to college to study to be an engineer, felt called into the ministry, and became a bi-vocational minister who laid bricks for a living as his own father had done.  Mom came from a rural background and became a schoolteacher.  We lived half an hour away from a county seat with two SLACs, one of which eventually became my alma mater.  Mom subsequently left K-12 teaching to spend the latter half of her career teaching at that SLAC.

I went to grad school out of state, dropped out ABD, and spent some years in the big city working at the university's library.  The city never felt like home.  I eventually came back to my home state as a small-town librarian.  That involved still more grad school to earn an MLS online.  I've never regretted it.  Though I'm over two hours from my home town (Never saw this place before my job interview, actually), it's also a timber products mill town and feels homelike.

It's true that the few educated people in rural areas often come from somewhere else.  But the ones who stay around usually come from rural backgrounds themselves.  They understand rural culture and want to live there.  They just couldn't work it out to find their profession in their original home area.  In my case, for example, professional-level librarian jobs open up perhaps once in a generation in a typical rural county, so if you're a librarian the odds of the planets aligning so you can work in your home county are remote.  But again, another rural area can feel like home in a way an urban area never could.

I second what the others have to say about culture being a challenge to rural students when it comes to higher education.  Our local schools were once very strong.  Most--not all--of the best students got educations for which there was little demand locally and moved away.  Their less studious siblings and classmates stayed behind and raised a new generation who generally lacked a commitment to education.  The schools have been in decline ever since, though they haven't sunk to the wretched level one sees a county over.  Unfortunately the good-paying industrial jobs that once took only a pair of hands and a willingness to show up are mostly either gone or have morphed into positions that require more education.  The locally-raised youth increasingly don't have the education to do the best work that remains.  Some of those who come in from elsewhere to do the work feel that the local area and culture are beneath them.  They either commute long distances from a larger community, or work just long enough to transfer to somewhere more congenial.

We still have a core of educated people who try to think outside the box to find ways to keep the town going in a time of general regional economic decline.  I've noticed that most of the real go-getters here either grew up in a different rural area before moving here, or came back here after spending some time elsewhere.  Those who've spent their entire lives here, for whom this is essentially their whole world, just don't seem to be able to do anything very proactive to meet new challenges.  It's frustrating, but I know these people well enough to know that they have their good points too.  I can't just disparage them or write them off as so many who never lived in a small town--or who fled one once they realized how vastly superior they were to all the people they'd grown up around--might.

The rural challenge is to find enough people who both know about and understand the broader world enough to have the skills the modern world needs, and yet love and understand the rural community.

[Hibush]

The rural challenge is to find enough people who both know about and understand the broader world enough to have the skills the modern world needs, and yet love and understand the rural community.

Very nicely put! 

[Cheerful]

....Our political leaders generally do not have college educations. They make major policy decisions about the community and determine spending priorities. They have the social capital to get elected. Some have good intentions, some are just warm bodies, some are mindless disruptors. They are hardly model of the value of a college degree to young people (but do make that point for those of us who have seen good government by smart educated people).

The dairies mentioned in the article are a good example of another aspect of the problem. Dairies are going out of business for structural reasons (massive incentives to keep production far above demand, causing prices to be artificially low and almost impossible to make  profit at). The dairies that go first are the ones using technology from ten or more years ago. They often have no college-educated people on the farm who could keep them competitive. Dairies that have people with the technology, genetics and business-planning knowledge one might get from a degree in agriculture are hanging in there. What you see in the news are the ones who are not keeping up, struggling painfully and complaining to reporters.

...A college education can help make rural businesses of all kinds more competitive.....

I'm not convinced that people without a college education can't be good public servants.  Many people with degrees are awful public officials.  Nor am I convinced that a college education is essential for business competitiveness.

Dairies are struggling partly because milk consumption has declined.  Cheese consumption has apparently increased, however.

If, by "college education," you mean a traditional BS or BA, smart people without such should be able to contribute usefully to society and have a decent life.  A problem is that the four-year (often 5-6 years) degree has become like a high school diploma in U.S. culture.  People often need one to be competitive in the job market because so many have one.

[Cheerful]

This reminds me of a university administrator I was talking to recently, from a state with very rural areas.  She was frustrated that they just couldn't get many from their rural areas to move away from those areas, even to get higher-level jobs, because those people wanted to stay near their families.  She had no doubt that a higher level job was more important than staying near one's family.  I thought maybe those students knew what they valued and maybe those values were just fine as they were.  Not to say that all rural areas are thriving and have sufficient jobs.  But maybe rural people are as able to make good choices about rural options as urban administrators are.

Yes, maybe those values are just fine.  For some, "higher-level" jobs and income are not worth the personal costs of moving away from family.

[ciao_yall]

This reminds me of a university administrator I was talking to recently, from a state with very rural areas.  She was frustrated that they just couldn't get many from their rural areas to move away from those areas, even to get higher-level jobs, because those people wanted to stay near their families.  She had no doubt that a higher level job was more important than staying near one's family.  I thought maybe those students knew what they valued and maybe those values were just fine as they were.  Not to say that all rural areas are thriving and have sufficient jobs.  But maybe rural people are as able to make good choices about rural options as urban administrators are.

Yes, maybe those values are just fine.  For some, "higher-level" jobs and income are not worth the personal costs of moving away from family.

Or, it's the great unknown. They have spent their lives relying on family and friends and know the rules of the local community. People don't like to move away from known to a place where they will lack the support systems and cultural knowledge needed to survive, much less thrive.

The Economist made this point recently - all well and good to wish people would move from West Virginia coal towns to Silicon Valley and become programmers, but asking them to leave the investment in their homes and community is a lot.

This is also why immigrants tend to cluster in communities. A few venture ahead, send word to friends, and they establish neighborhoods we call Little Italy, Chinatown, etc.

[ciao_yall]

Our political leaders generally do not have college educations. They make major policy decisions about the community and determine spending priorities. They have the social capital to get elected. Some have good intentions, some are just warm bodies, some are mindless disruptors. They are hardly model of the value of a college degree to young people (but do make that point for those of us who have seen good government by smart educated people).

"Our" meaning your local area? Because 99.99% of pols at the national level and likely state have college degrees. Of course, some are the first to then complain about how overpriced and meaningless these degrees are...

I would say that a college or graduate degree doesn't mean someone knows anything about education or education policy. Like shoppers don't know much about marketing, or sick people don't know much about medicine.

[ciao_yall]

Slightly dated but still relevant article on Greece's economic problems.

Also points to issues of knowledge and experience, similar to the dairies described by Hibush.

[apl68]

This reminds me of a university administrator I was talking to recently, from a state with very rural areas.  She was frustrated that they just couldn't get many from their rural areas to move away from those areas, even to get higher-level jobs, because those people wanted to stay near their families.  She had no doubt that a higher level job was more important than staying near one's family.  I thought maybe those students knew what they valued and maybe those values were just fine as they were.  Not to say that all rural areas are thriving and have sufficient jobs.  But maybe rural people are as able to make good choices about rural options as urban administrators are.

Yes, maybe those values are just fine.  For some, "higher-level" jobs and income are not worth the personal costs of moving away from family.

Or, it's the great unknown. They have spent their lives relying on family and friends and know the rules of the local community. People don't like to move away from known to a place where they will lack the support systems and cultural knowledge needed to survive, much less thrive.

The Economist made this point recently - all well and good to wish people would move from West Virginia coal towns to Silicon Valley and become programmers, but asking them to leave the investment in their homes and community is a lot.

This is also why immigrants tend to cluster in communities. A few venture ahead, send word to friends, and they establish neighborhoods we call Little Italy, Chinatown, etc.

And then some who do venture out decide it's worth the trade-offs involved in going back.  Others would do so if there was any way to make it economically feasible.

Declining to move from fading rural areas to Silicon Valley can make economic sense in some cases.  You make less in rural areas, all right, but assuming you can find a job you're likely to find a much lower cost of living.  A decade and a half ago it cost me as much each month to rent a near-dump of an apartment in Big City as it does to buy a house with a good yard in my current town.  And that includes taxes and home insurance!  The cost of living back there has skyrocketed since.  In the vicinity of Silicon Valley there are people making about what I am living in their cars.  This is one of the reasons why I was so impatient with suggestions mooted a few years ago to give people in depressed rural areas money to move to booming big cities.  Killing off small towns in order to make the boomtowns even more ridiculously crowded isn't going to help anybody.

[Hibush]

Our political leaders generally do not have college educations. They make major policy decisions about the community and determine spending priorities. They have the social capital to get elected. Some have good intentions, some are just warm bodies, some are mindless disruptors. They are hardly model of the value of a college degree to young people (but do make that point for those of us who have seen good government by smart educated people).

"Our" meaning your local area? Because 99.99% of pols at the national level and likely state have college degrees. Of course, some are the first to then complain about how overpriced and meaningless these degrees are...

I would say that a college or graduate degree doesn't mean someone knows anything about education or education policy. Like shoppers don't know much about marketing, or sick people don't know much about medicine.

I mean county and below.

[polly_mer]

I'm going to piggyback here with more tidbits related to rural education.

College Fairs Might Seem Ho-Hum, Until You Meet the Rural Students at This One is a CHE article regarding how isolated some small places in Arizona are still.

House Science Committee Adds Rural STEM Education to Broadening Participation Push is a funding bill that seems like its heart is in the right place, but neglects a lot of how rural poverty is different from urban poverty due to infrastructure differences.

[Ruralguy]

yeah, you can expect a rural kid to ride the bus to the local college. They are pretty much stuck where they are unless there is a sympathetic adult with gas money.