Elite schools are targeting more rural applicants

Long overlooked among the more selective colleges, potential students living in rural areas are becoming more sought after to help bring more diversity to campuses and to help address the obstacles that have prevented them from entering in the past. According to the New York Times, only 29 percent of college-aged kids in rural areas are currently enrolled compared with 47 percent of the urban population. More alarming is the fact they are represented less in the competitive schools and tend to enter community colleges and state programs.

The rural perspective creates some of this gap with the idea that college degrees are less relevant or useful for the types of jobs usually found outside of cities. These students may feel like they are facing the choice between getting an education and staying in the area in which they grew up. Similarly, many rural high schoolers admit to having low expectations in general over schooling and seldom have the same drive to enroll in college as their urban and suburban peers. For many, merely graduating from school and learning a skill such as welding is their idea of normal. With this in mind, many college-focused organizations are striving to make college aspirations more realistic and desirable by spreading awareness and making information about higher education more accessible.

To be fair to rural students, The Wall Street Journal points out that they have also suffered from little direct outreach from colleges, especially the elite schools, in the past, and enrollment has risen more slowly than that of the urban population. Many schools have tried to boost diversity over the years by targeting underrepresented groups such as ethnic minorities and people with lower socioeconomic status, but lower income rural populations have not benefitted much from these policies. In fact, studies have shown that poor rural kids are often overlooked because of factors such as a lack of advanced placement classes and extracurricular activities that selective schools value, despite excellent test scores. Even leadership roles in traditionally rural organizations such as 4-H and Future Farmers of America work against these students.