For Rural Students, Is College an Educated Out?

For years, Mara Casey Tieken, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D.’11, has been studying rural education. It started, in some ways, with the three years she spent as a third-grade elementary school teacher in Vanleer, Tennessee, leading up to her current job as an associate professor of education at Bates College, where she teaches classes on rural justice and where she wrote her first book on why rural schools matter.

In May, Tieken published her latest book, Educated Out, pulling the focus tighter on rural students and how geography shapes their access to college, their college experiences, and their postgraduation opportunities. The book follows nine first-generation rural students who enroll at an elite college and successfully graduate but, as Tieken discovers, the costs are high as these students are “educated out” of rural America. We spoke with Tieken this summer about the importance of place, opportunity, and why going to college shouldn’t require grittiness from some students more than others.

In your new book, you write that “geography has mostly been neglected as a factor structuring college access,” but that it shouldn't be. Why?
It’s pretty widely recognized that race and class shape college access: a white, wealthy student attending an elite boarding school, for example, has a much greater chance of attending a highly selective school than a low-income Black or Brown student from a public high school. However, there’s been much less attention to how where a student is from shapes access. And my research shows that geography actually matters a great deal.

Part of this is explained by “spatial injustice,” something you write about in the book. Explain what you mean.
Spatial injustice is the unevenness of resources across geography. It’s a term coined by geographer Edward Soja, and he mostly applied the concept in urban settings, but I’ve found it to be useful for thinking much more broadly across rural and urban contexts alike. Think about unequal access to healthcare, grocery stores, or broadband; these are manifestations of spatial injustice that disadvantage many rural communities and also some urban ones. We see spatial injustice in education, too. One example is the availability of school counselors; many rural and remote schools, including the one where I used to teach in Tennessee, don’t have a full-time counselor. Imagine that a child is out of school for a week, and, when he returns, his teacher learns that his father just passed away. He’s clearly struggling and could use some time with the guidance counselor, but, unfortunately, it’s a Monday, and the counselor is at a different school on Mondays. He can’t get the support he needs because of where he lives. This is spatial injustice. 

Higher education is also rife with examples. Most of the students I followed in Educated Out never had an admissions official from an elite college visit their high school. These officials focus their time and attention on schools where they are likely to yield lots of applications; from a fiscal perspective, it doesn’t make sense for them to spend time and resources traveling to a small school where they may or may not get any interested students. So, they ignore those schools. But, of course, these schools are rural schools, and their absence only worsens the urban/rural college attainment gap.

Talent, and you say, is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Can you share a story related to his?
Before I received my doctorate from HGSE and started teaching at Bates, I was a third-grade teacher in rural Tennessee. I loved it. I loved being a part of a small rural community, and I loved my students, who were all bright, talented, and curious. So, I was finishing up my first year at Bates, and one afternoon in May, I checked my mailbox and found a graduation announcement: my former third graders were starting to graduate from high school. Over the next few weeks, I got more announcements in the mail and on Facebook, and, with these announcements, my students also shared their plans with me. They were doing really important work, becoming vet techs and linemen and parents. But I was struck by how few were going to college — and none was going to the elite kind of school where I was now teaching. Because I knew these kids so well, I could say, without a doubt, that it wasn’t due to lack of talent. These kids were brilliant! Instead, it was lack of opportunity. They didn’t have access to the SAT prep classes, the AP classes, the college counselors, the admissions officials, the adults with “college knowledge,” and so many other critical college-going resources that many non-rural kids do. College just wasn’t an option for them in the same way that it is for kids from other places.

You stress, though, that not every student has to go to an elite college.
To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything especially magical or even meritorious about elite schools. But, deserved or not, research suggests that the graduates of elite schools make more money, and these schools can be a pathway toward social mobility. I didn’t want my kids to necessarily go to an elite school, but I wanted them to have that option — I wanted it to be a choice, for them and for their families, if they wanted to pursue it.

The nine students you followed recognized this. When you asked them if everyone should go to college, they told you that's not the right question to ask. That right question was about why everyone doesn’t have the same opportunity. Did their response surprise you?
It did, and for a few reasons. First, the “should everyone go to college?” debate is pretty pervasive right now, and it’s heated. And sometimes I’d get caught up in that debate, too, and lose sight of how the terms of the debate obscure the bigger questions around access and opportunity. I’m grateful to the students for calling me out! 

I was also surprised because the students often struggled to see how geography shaped their own college experiences and opportunities. There’s a vocabulary, however limited and ineffectual, for how race and class influence college opportunity; we don’t have that for geography. And so they often individualized the challenges and struggles they faced: they just weren’t good at math, they just didn’t have the connections, they just didn’t have the resume. They couldn’t see how geography shaped those factors. But this was one of those moments where they could see that larger opportunity structure — even if they didn’t fully grasp how geography fit in — and they were asking us — researchers, practitioners, policymakers — to do something about it.

Why did you decide to study rural students who do go on to college, as opposed to those who don't?
First, I was eager to dispel some of the myths around “uneducated rural America” — some rural residents are, in fact, highly educated, and many rural parents do, in fact, want their children to go to college. Second, in sociology, there’s this concept of “studying up”; it’s the idea that you can learn just as much about inequality by studying the experiences of the advantaged as the disadvantaged. I knew that focusing on the experiences of rural students attending elite four-year schools could provide an important window into the structure of educational opportunity: I’d learn about the challenges and barriers they faced, as well as the resources they used. And this could provide insights that would be relevant to students and educators across a variety of types of institutions.

This group of students was "gritty," but you write that going to college shouldn't require grit. What do you mean?
Sometimes I think we place a little too much emphasis on this quality of grittiness, without questioning why students should need grit to begin with. Certainly, any college experience requires some grit; you need to learn to develop goals, work hard, make choices, and persevere. But college shouldn’t require intense sacrifice from only some students. Marginalized students — whether that’s racially, socioeconomically, or geographically — shouldn’t have to compromise their identities. They shouldn’t have to choose between home and school. They shouldn’t have to endure periods of isolation and alienation. When we tell students to just be gritty, we overlook the larger structural forces that require some students to give up some part of themselves or their well-being in return for their degree. And that’s not okay.

How do we change this?
We can make our campuses more welcoming and affirming for rural students, socially, culturally, and politically. We can expand financial aid to account for the hidden costs of college. We can stop centering urban centers and urban people (and whiteness and wealth) in our curricula and programming. We can rethink our admissions processes, replacing superficial markers of geographic diversity — like states represented — with ones that reflect indicators of spatial marginality, like isolation or remoteness, and understanding that overcoming spatial barriers is an indication of merit. We can expand our career counseling to account for students’ limited career knowledge and center students’ locational aspirations. And, more generally, we can develop our collective awareness of the role that geography plays in shaping college opportunity, so that we can seek to mitigate the challenges and capitalize upon the resources. 

But I do think we need to change more than just colleges. We need economic policies that work to strengthen rural economies so that when rural students choose college, they aren’t also sentenced to an adult life lived far from home. We need more jobs for college educated workers in rural places.

Otherwise, as you say, rural communities pay a cost when local students go off to college.
Most jobs for college degree-holders are located in cities. So, when rural kids go off to college, there is a strong likelihood that they will not return. This translates into lost human capital, of course; it can also mean the loss of potential leaders, new ideas, young families. And it can threaten relationships that those rural kids have with family and friends back home. I do think there are perhaps more opportunities for college-educated youth in rural communities than we often think, especially now post-pandemic, but the go-to-the-city narrative is so pervasive that we often overlook those options. We need to challenge that narrative, as well as coordinate educational and economic policy so that returning is a possibility — and college doesn’t have to be an education out.

What’s one thing you most want readers to take away from your new book?
I’d like readers to, first, come away with a more nuanced and complex understanding of rural America and a willingness to question many of the rural stereotypes. I also hope that they gain an awareness of how geography shapes college opportunity and, perhaps, some things we can do about that. For rural students reading this book, I hope that it validates some of their experiences. I want them to know that they’re not alone and that any challenges or barriers they face might reflect the larger geography of opportunity, which doesn’t favor folks from rural and remote places. I also want them to know that we — policymakers, practitioners, and researchers — have some real work to do to make colleges more accessible and inclusive, and we’ll need their leadership on this.