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Rural College Advocates Hope to Move Past 'Stereotypes and Anecdotes'

By Owen Daugherty, NASFAA Staff Reporter 

A new research group aimed to create an innovative metric that actually identifies if an institution of higher education is a rural-serving institution (RSI), and not just based on its geographic location.

The Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges (ARRC) in its new report, “Introducing Our Nation’s Rural-Serving Postsecondary Institutions” wants to show how widespread RSIs are and detail the different types of students they serve.

“RSIs have not been a primary focus of researchers or policymakers, which has constrained their ability to provide the greatest possible benefits to their students and communities,” according to the report, resulting in RSIs being limited to “stereotypes and anecdotes, rather than empirical evidence.”

The group first formed last year and is hoping to fill the void in research on RSIs for policymakers and stakeholders. Its new metric used in an accompanying report will help further define rurality beyond simply location, the group said.

“Too often, rural institutions have been identified solely based on their location and whether that place is classified as rural under a given government agency’s locale definition,” the report stated.

Without a standard definition for what constitutes a place as rural, too many institutions and students are left out of the conversation, and federal funding isn’t efficiently funneled to these schools.

Since public RSIs receive a greater share of their revenues from state appropriations than non-RSIs, the report noted, clearly identifying which schools are RSIs will be particularly beneficial to lawmakers and policymakers at the state and local level. 

The group’s metric takes into account population and location alongside degree fields, helping college and university leaders create institutional peer groups for the purposes of benchmarking, strategic planning, and continuous improvement, the group said in a press release on its new report.

To create the metric, the researchers used five variables, including the percentage of an institution’s home county population classified as rural, the average rural population percentage of all adjacent counties, the population size of the institution’s home county, the institution’s home county adjacency to a metro area, and the percentage of an institution’s awarded credentials in fields of rural importance, such as agriculture or natural resources.

That’s why it’s telling that the report found RSIs are present across all sections of higher education and enroll students from various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The report found 1,087 RSIs by using the researchers’ metric, including 33% of all private four-year institutions, 46% of all public four-year institutions, and more than half of all public two-year schools.

Additionally, about one-third of historically Black colleges and universities are RSIs, as well as 93% of tribal colleges and universities, and 18% of Hispanic-serving institutions. 

The demographic RSIs serve was also detailed in the report, finding that 35% or more of the RSI student body are people of color, “upending persistent myths conflating ‘rural’ and ‘white’,” the authors wrote.

Notably, the report also found that 83% of higher education institutions located in low employment counties are RSIs and more than two-thirds of the institutions located in persistent poverty counties are also RSIs.

Generally speaking, RSIs have lower average enrollments compared to non-rural-serving institutions, though they enroll a large share of Pell Grant-eligible students and a higher percentage of Native American students.

“RSIs are important educational access points for low-income students, adult learners, and those from marginalized racial backgrounds, and they are critical to regional economic development, as many RSIs are the largest employer in their region. These institutions have deep connections to their communities, and this project will help those stories to be told,” Andrew Koricich, ARRC’s executive director, said in a press release announcing the report.

The metric used in the report, along with the data file, full report, interactive map, and data documentation are all available on ARRC’s website, as the group hopes it will enable other researchers to conduct qualitative and quantitative studies about RSIs.

“With increased research, RSIs will receive more attention in public discourse. Better understanding about RSIs may also encourage legislators to craft more favorable funding policies and philanthropists to view RSIs as worthy of investment,” the report concludes. “RSIs must be protected and supported, as they are irreplaceable anchor institutions whose existence directly or indirectly affects millions of people.”

 

Publication Date: 2/2/2022


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