IES is pleased to announce the National Education Research and Development Center for Improving Rural Postsecondary Education. This Center will be the first rural R&D center to focus on improving access to postsecondary education and completion of postsecondary degrees and credentials for students from rural K-12 districts and locales. Center researchers will disaggregate findings about rural students to better understand variation by student subgroups including racial/ethnic groupings, levels of family income, and genders. Through this investment, IES will support research useful to leaders and staff in rural districts and high schools, administrators and practitioners at rural-serving colleges and universities, and state-level administrators and policymakers concerned with extending postsecondary opportunities to rural students.
This investment continues IES’s prior and ongoing investments in rural R&D centers which started in 2004 with the National Research Center on Rural Education Support (NCRES), and continued in 2009 with The National Center for Research on Rural Education. IES currently supports two rural R&D Centers: The National Center for Rural Education Research Networks (NCRERN), and The National Center for Rural School Mental Health (NCRSMH): Enhancing the Capacity of Rural Schools to Identify, Prevent, and Intervene in Youth Mental Health Concerns. Specifically, this new Center expands on the work of NCRES, which explored the factors that influence postsecondary aspirations for rural African American, Latinx, and Native American high school students. One of the new Center’s eight studies will conduct a representative survey of rural students in three states to assess their postsecondary aspirations and choices.
The new rural Center plans an expansive research agenda that includes a national landscape study of rural students’ postsecondary enrollment and factors that contribute to their postsecondary success, drawing on National Center for Education Statistics data including district-level data collected through the Common Core of Data program and nationally-representative student-level data collected through the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. Six additional studies conducted across 10 states focus on rural students and the programs that support them in their transitions to and through college. In addition to the descriptive study of rural students aspirations mentioned above, five studies assess specific strategies for improving postsecondary access and success including dual enrollment programs for rural high school students, community-based organizations that encourage and facilitate college enrollment, supportive high school and postsecondary environments for African American students, the comprehensive Montana 10 student support program, and a train-in-place program for rural nursing students.
The Center will carry out a robust program of national leadership and dissemination. Leadership activities will include building the capacity of state agencies, rural-located practitioners, and early-career researchers to conduct research on rural students and rural-serving colleges and universities. Representatives from six state commissions and college systems, and advisory panels of external researchers and practitioners from across the country will guide the Center’s research. Five national organizations that partner with postsecondary institutions and advocate for student needs will assist the Center with disseminating its findings to broad audiences of policymakers, administrators, and practitioners that serve rural students and districts. At the conclusion of its work, the Center will publish a synthesis of its research findings and share it widely.
Map of Rural Postsecondary Education R&D Center Focus States
This blog was written by James Benson (James.Benson@ed.gov), program officer, NCER.