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But the institution saw its enrollment more than double between 2013 and 2023, largely by focusing on the regional and state population. The heavily rural, 11-parish area in which the campus sits accounts for 94 percent of its student body, and the state’s residents make up 70 percent of its online learners. LSU-Alexandria has grown largely by expanding its online enrollment and touting its low cost and high value. The undergraduate-only institution has developed pipelines to the state’s graduate professional programs. It’s created programs for the rural work force — including aviation, disaster preparedness, and cybersecurity — and programs that feed into local companies, like RoyOMartin, a plywood manufacturer, and utilities and hospitals.
Where its graduates once left for Texas, the institution is now trying to keep them at home. “You can get a degree here and a job here and not have to leave Louisiana,” says Paul Coreil, the chancellor, summing up the pitch to students and families.
LSU-Alexandria’s approach is similar to one being used by other successful rural-serving institutions across the country. With significant populations of adult and Pell-eligible students, a robust online program, and a commitment to flexibility, these institutions, which include private liberal-arts colleges, regional publics, and online institutions, have embraced a mission to serve rural students — a demographic with which higher education has long struggled to connect.
It’s a population that is slated to grow in coming years. In the latest installment of its “Knocking at the College Door” report, issued last December, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) found that rural areas are expected to account for the largest raw increase in high-school seniors in 2034 compared with 2023. While cities and suburbs will still produce the majority of them, the former will likely see steep decreases and the latter’s growth will be more modest.
The notion that rural areas are growing runs counter to a decades-long narrative of decline. But WICHE’s forecast last year, which included projections for urban and rural areas for the first time, is buttressed by other data points. The population of nonmetro areas has grown since 2020 after a decade of losses, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2020 and 2021, the vast majority of net migration to these counties was from other parts of the country (think remote workers, unbound by space constraints, or young people seeking more affordable housing and a better quality of life).
Soon after, domestic net migration to rural areas decreased, the USDA found. But international migration went up, with nearly half of rural areas’ net gains in 2022 and 2023 coming from immigrants. Another indicator: The largest increase in undergraduate enrollment — more than 9 percent — over the past two years has been among institutions in rural areas, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
“There is a slight gain in the number of rural students. That’s the news,” says Patrick Lane, vice president for policy analysis and research at WICHE.
Yes, it’s a slight increase. But as the crop of high-school seniors is expected to decline for several years before modestly rising again around 2033, even marginal gains, particularly among populations that higher education has not always effectively tapped, offer an opportunity.
“Our underlying message is always, Yes, there may be fewer students in the future, but there are still plenty of potential students out there,” Lane says. “How can you find those students and better serve them, better meet their needs?”
Several scholars of rural higher education who spoke with The Chronicle come from such areas themselves, and they consistently recall feeling alienated when they arrived on campus — not unlike what first-generation students and students of color describe, says Tony Pipa, a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution, who has written about rural America and produces a podcast on the subject. “They feel like a fish out of water,” he says of rural students. “Rural is an identity.”
That sense of identity can leave a lasting impact, says Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education and student affairs at Appalachian State University and executive director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges. He identified the mix of attributes that make LSU-Alexandria and other rural-serving institutions successful.
Koricich’s recent research asked respondents whether they live in a rural area and whether they identify as having a rural background. While nearly one-quarter of the population lives in rural America, Koricich found that half of his respondents identify as having a direct rural connection, even if they’re no longer physically there. “You don’t leave it behind,” he says.
When rural scholars meet each other, they might find common ground discussing how many stoplights or how few people were in the communities in which they grew up, Koricich says. The sense of identity expresses itself in deeper ways, too. “I think there’s a piece of it that is very much around self-sufficiency,” he says. “You meet other rural scholars and we have similar stories about how we had to figure out everything ourselves.”
But experts like Pipa and Koricich, each of whom grew up in rural Pennsylvania before going off to college, tend to be exceptions. Students from rural high schools enroll in college at levels that lag behind their peers, and rural low-income students tend to lag even further, according to a study in Research in Higher Education. Among the high-school class of 2024, just over half of those from rural areas went immediately from high school to college, the lowest rate among the three types of regions analyzed by the Clearinghouse. (The other two categories were urban and suburban.) Rural high schoolers immediately enrolled in college at rates similar to those found at high-poverty and low-income schools. “Whenever we’re thinking about rural folks going to college, the stereotype is they don’t value postsecondary education,” Koricich says. “They have a complicated relationship with higher ed. It’s complicated when they’re lured away and then never come back.”
While people from rural areas are aware of the advantages of a college education, many of them also feel that colleges siphon away the region’s most promising young minds, often for good. “Rural places see colleges as this vacuum that sucks their talent away and never returns it,” says Nicholas Hillman, a professor in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. That narrative feeds populist resentment of the sector, which can overshadow the other, more positive story about how colleges serve as anchor institutions in rural places. Both tales are true, Hillman says. “Higher education can play a lot of conflicting roles.”
The marketing language colleges use may unwittingly exacerbate rural misgivings, especially when they present themselves as an escape valve. “For a long time, and this can still be the norm, the prevailing narrative is that for you to access real opportunity, you’ve got to get out of here,” Pipa says. “Colleges need to recognize that might not be what everybody wants. They might want something that sets them up for opportunity at home.”
If the relationship between rural areas and higher education can be fraught with stereotypes, so is the notion of what rural America looks like. Nearly one-quarter of rural America is made up of people of color. Among those under 18, it’s closer to one-third.
Rural and racial or ethnic identities can also intersect in challenging ways, as Daniel Rios Arroyo, an assistant professor of higher education at Appalachian State, has found in his research on Hispanic students in rural California. Rural Hispanic students couldn’t fully connect to nonrural Hispanic students, he says, and their rural identity was more salient than their ethnic or racial one. “We may experience the same cultural traditions and speak Spanish,” he says, “but we have different lifestyles, values, and experiences.”
But the obstacles for rural students go beyond issues of messaging, personal choice, or even culture. “The pathways to higher education are constrained in ways that have nothing to do with individual motivation or aspiration,” Rios Arroyo says. ”Distance creates a systemic barrier.”
A major factor is that rural students simply have few colleges close to them. For example, in Texas, which has a large, racially and socioeconomically diverse rural population, all students in suburban and urban areas went to a high school within 30 miles of a community college, and nearly all were close to a public, four-year institution. In comparison, 88 percent of rural high-school students were similarly close to a community college, and 61 percent had a public, four-year college within 30 miles, according to research by Riley Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University, in Ohio. Traveling longer distances to attend college is associated with other costs and obstacles, like higher levels of student debt.
Information can still be a valuable tool, particularly for more selective institutions that recruit nationally, says Hillman, of Wisconsin. But information alone may not work for regional colleges that enroll students more locally. “The expensive and sustainable and difficult work is to look at the full picture,” he says — broadly examining the sector’s structure and the location of its institutions. That might mean community colleges offering bachelor’s degrees, because they’re more likely to be located in rural areas than four-year institutions are. But, Hillman added, when community colleges start doing so, it can create a domino effect, straining regionals. “I wouldn’t say it’s a simple solution,” he says. “There are tradeoffs.”
Even largely successful strategies aren’t a guarantee. Koricich points out that St. Andrews and Limestone Universities, in North Carolina and South Carolina, respectively — two colleges that check the same boxes as LSU-Alexandria and other rural-serving institutions by embracing flexibility — closed in the spring.
Other rural-serving colleges have found success with enrollment strategies used by colleges more broadly. At William Woods University, a small private college near a town of 12,000 in the middle of Missouri, such strategies include building out its athletics program and bolstering international recruitment. Nearly three-quarters of the student body are athletes, and its students come from 35 countries. It’s still regionally focused, though: Nearly two-thirds of its students are from Missouri.
It has also embraced its rural character. Campus tours include a visit to the campus’s horse barns and, quite often, appearances by Lucky and Afro, two of the campus ducks. “It’s a unique environment,” says Romaine Seguin, the acting president. Distinctive academic programs in equestrian studies and American Sign Language have also helped solidify William Woods’ enrollment; the two fields account for nearly one-third of bachelor’s degrees awarded. Online graduate programs in education have also proven beneficial, says Seguin. “The more student-centric you are,” she says, “the more successful you are.”
For rural students, student-centric colleges could be ones that offer flexible programs, usually online, especially for students who might have to commute long distances to campus. Collecting data also helps, because information about rural students isn’t consistently tracked or uniformly defined. Dedicated and targeted resources, like spaces reserved for those students, or summer-bridge programs to recruit them, are ways to surmount obstacles in enrolling them and helping them succeed.
But establishing such programs and spaces may only become more difficult as federal and state lawmakers put diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — including those that recognize characteristics seen as possible proxies for race and ethnicity — under attack. It’s yet another obstacle for a group of students that have already seen their share.
