Project Activities
The Center will conduct studies focused on postsecondary education transitions, persistence, and completion in rural areas — adding significant value to a long under-researched area of higher education and answering questions arising directly from rural-located practitioners and policymakers. The Center's research will answer four main questions:
- What is the current rural college-going and college completion landscape nationally, and how does it vary across regions and student demographics?
- How can academic pathways between high school and college be strengthened for rural high school students?
- How do prospective college students in rural areas conceptualize their postsecondary options and make decisions about undertaking college or workforce training?
- How can institutions and states improve college persistence and completion rates for rural students?
The Center comprises six research teams engaged in studies at the national level including rural students from all 50 states, and in state-level studies spanning a total of 10 states. Research will include a national landscape study of college access and completion for rural students and a survey of rural students' college aspirations and choices in 3 states. Distributed teams will conduct five studies to explore and evaluate promising strategies for increasing college attainment among rural students. An advisory board of practitioners and external researchers will guide the research by reviewing findings and providing feedback. Three dissemination partners will focus on sharing findings from the research with policymakers, administrators, practitioners, and research organizations across the United States. Center leadership will conduct and publish a synthesis of findings at the end of the project.
Focused program of research
Through its distributed set of studies, the Center will generate vital research evidence to answer open questions on the topic of rural higher education, elevate rural colleges and rural students in higher education research, promote educational equity, and provide action steps and best practices for rural leaders seeking to improve college access and completion. Center research teams will conduct these eight studies (in these locations):
- Measuring Rural College Access and Completion across the United States (50 states and territories)
- Rural Students' College Aspirations and Choice Making (Alabama, Montana, and Wisconsin)
- Rural Dual Enrollment Expansion Evaluations (Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee)
- Exploring Rural-Serving College Access Programs (Oregon and Idaho)
- College Enrollment and Navigation for Rural Black Youth (Alabama)
- The Montana 10 Randomized Controlled Trial (Montana)
- Evaluating “Train in Place” Rural Nursing Programs (Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming)
- Rural Research Center Synthesis (50 states and territories)
National leadership and outreach activities
In addition to conducting the constituent studies, the Center will undertake national leadership to share the results of its research broadly, build the capacity of researchers and rural-serving institutions to conduct research, and support practitioners and early career researchers seeking to improve postsecondary outcomes for rural students. The Center will create a dedicated website that will serve as a one-stop resource for policymakers, practitioners, researchers, nonprofit staff, and others committed to rural higher education. The website will build on MDRC's existing listserv and employ products such as videos, podcasts, and multi-media presentations, and disseminate its findings through established networks whose memberships look to them for timely and trustworthy research findings and best practices for K–12 and postsecondary students. The Center will subcontract with the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT), the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships (NCCEP), the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), and the Southern Education Foundation (SEF) to support dissemination of Center findings. The Center will host two formal convenings tied to national conferences, one focusing on rural community college students and the other focused on rural high school students preparing for college. The Center will convene ad hoc meetings in participating states to respond to changing legislative landscapes when timely briefings can assist local partners. The Center will engage in intensive capacity building activities with three constituencies: state agencies, rural-located practitioners, and early-career researchers. This training will include building methodological and research use capacity to, for instance, help partners to understand their own data in ways that allow them to conduct their own analysis, and building their data literacy to communicate their findings to local partners. Through a new Rural Research Mentorship Network (RRMN), Center leaders will prepare undergraduate, graduate, and early-career scholars to engage in policy-relevant, rigorous, and equity-informed rural research.
Structured Abstract
Setting
The national landscape study, Measuring Rural College Access and Completion across the United States, will include students from rural school districts in all 50 states and territories. The state-based studies will focus on rural learners in two geographic regions, the South and the Mountain West, that have high rates of rural poverty and low rates of postsecondary attainment. These studies will take place in ten states: Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
Sample
In Study 1, researchers will draw on nationally representative data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to focus on students from rural high school districts across all 50 states and territories. Sample sizes will vary depending on the data source. In Study 2, researchers will draw a representative sample of approximately 1500 rural students across Alabama, Montana, and Wisconsin. Study 3 will employ statewide administrative datasets of high school students to focus on students in dual enrollment programs within rural districts in Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The quantitative data are expected to cover more than 75,000 students across five cohorts in Alabama; 150,000 students across four cohorts in North Carolina; and 124,000 students across eight cohorts in Tennessee. Researchers for Study 3 will draw qualitative interview and focus group samples of administrators and students from site visits with 12 high schools and 3 colleges in each of the three states. Study 4 will first identify relevant community-based college access programs by combining information from national college attainment organizations, website searches, and preliminary interviews with administrators of identified community-based programs From this list, researchers will select four high-quality programs distributed across the two states for intensive site visits, and will conduct approximately 25 semi-structured interviews of administrators, staff, and students at each of the sites along with observations and documents relating to implementation of the programs. In Study 5, researchers will conduct interviews with approximately 80 African American students attending 6 Alabama colleges: 3 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and 3 predominantly White institutions (PWIs) with substantial enrollments of African American students including students from the Black Belt geographic area. The Study 6 research team will recruit a sample of approximately 1,500 students across eight campuses within the Montana University System, of which approximately 1,000 students attended a rural high school. The qualitative study will focus exclusively on the rural students and rural colleges in the study, conducting focus groups with at least 50 rural college students to understand their unique experiences. Study 7 will sample approximately 60 students as well as faculty and administrators across 3 train-in-place nursing programs located in Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Study 8 will draw findings obtained from multiple quantitative and qualitative samples employed in the constituent studies.
Research design and methods
In Study 1, the research team will combine national censuses of students measured at the district and student levels with geocodes of students' home locations to quantitatively assess patterns of college access and completion for students from rural areas. The research team will also employ nationally representative samples of high school students and incoming college students collected by NCES to quantitatively assess factors associated with college success for rural students. In Study 2, the research team will employ a stratified sampling design to yield a representative sample of rural students across 3 states, to accurately describe students' views and experiences in these states. In Study 3, researchers will subset censuses of high school students in three states to include only students from rural districts and then link these datasets to college attainment data to quantitatively assess students' subsequent college enrollment and attainment. In the qualitative arm of Study 3, researchers will use a purposive, maximum variation sampling strategy to prioritize recruitment of sites with high-quality dual enrollment programs that vary in terms of locale, student characteristics, and program type, to assess the key features of these programs. In study 4, researchers will rely on its purposive sample of 4 high-quality community-based programs to qualitatively assess the features of these programs. In study 5, the research team will employ a critical participatory action research (CPAR) framework coupled with a qualitative case study to understand how rural Black students access and navigate HBCUs and PWIs in Alabama, with a focus on institutions serving large proportions of African American students from the Black Belt region. In study 6, the research team will employ a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to quantitatively assess the impacts of the program on students' postsecondary progress and degree attainment. The qualitative portion of Study 6 will combine a survey of all students randomized into the Montana 10 program with site visits to all participating campuses. Researchers will also conduct focus groups and interviews with students from rural high schools and in rural colleges to understand the specific features of their college experiences and perceptions. In Study 7, the research team will employ a mixed-methods case study design to draw on data from a purposively varied set of 3 rural-serving nursing programs distributed across colleges and universities in 3 states, to identify critical elements of program design, implementation, and programmatic outcomes. In Study 8, the research team will draw upon the consistent focus of the constituent studies on rural students and rural areas to develop qualitative themes and lessons learned from the studies. For Study 8, researchers will also synthesize quantitative findings from the studies to draw conclusions about enrollment and attainment patterns for rural college students, and the program features that promote college success.
Key measures
The primary outcomes of interest across all studies are postsecondary enrollment, persistence, and degree completion. Study 3 and Study 7 will also assess labor market outcomes.
Data analytic strategy
In Study 1, researchers will compute descriptive statistics weighted by district size to describe the patterns of college enrollment and degree attainment for students from rural K–12 districts. In Study 1, researchers will also employ sampling weights in the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) and the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (2012/2017) in regression analyses to accurately assess factors associated with college success for rural students. In Study 2, researchers will employ sampling weights based on the sampling design to accurately compute representative descriptive statistics of rural students' college intentions and choices in three states. In Study 3, researchers will use regression analysis of large administrative datasets from each of three states to assess factors at the student and program levels associated with postsecondary degree attainment and subsequent labor market outcomes. In the qualitative arm of Study 3, researchers will employ a mixture of deductive and inductive coding to analyze data from site visits and interviews. In Study 4, researchers will analyze the site visit and interview data through a combination of deductive coding based on concepts from the literature and inductive coding based on themes that emerge through observations, interviews with administrators and students, and discussions with administrators and students. In Study 5, researchers will triangulate between data collected from interviews, focus groups, and site visits. To confirm their findings, they will verify each claim with at least 2 research participants. In Study 6, researchers will use regression analysis with student-level covariates and campus-level fixed effects to precisely estimate impacts of the program. Qualitative researchers will use a mix of deductive and inductive coding, starting with concepts from the current literature on rural college students, to arrive at a set of findings on the experiences of rural college students in Montana. In Study 7, researchers will use inductive coding methods to draw themes from participant focus groups and interviews as well as public documents. After this initial coding, researchers will identify key programmatic elements that support rural participants' enrollment, persistence, completion, and labor market outcomes. In Study 8, researchers will review the center's studies and summarize key issues and findings from each study, drawing from both qualitative and quantitative analyses. They will then compare and contrast issues and findings across studies to draw out themes and actionable lessons for rural postsecondary education, identify directions for future research, and elevate illustrative examples from center partners' efforts.
Cost analysis strategy
Study 6, The Montana 10 Randomized Controlled Trial, will include cost and cost-effectiveness analyses. The cost analysis will employ the ingredients method to estimate program costs. The research team will also estimate non-program costs, cost-effectiveness of the program, and return on investment for colleges where students benefit from the program. The other studies, given their research questions and methods, will not include cost analyses.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Project contributors
Products and publications
Products: Every study will produce open-access written reports on research findings. In addition, the studies will produce journal articles, policy briefs, and practitioner guides relevant to their topic. The Center will synthesize and post common themes and emerging lessons throughout the project period and will produce a comprehensive synthesis at the end of the project. The Center will create a dedicated website that will house all research reports as well as Expert Q&As, podcasts, webinars, conference presentation materials, and student voices.
ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.
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Supplemental information
Co-Principal Investigators: Dorime-Williams, Marjorie; Edmunds, Julie; Hillman, Nicholas
Partner Institutions: Alabama Commission on Higher Education; Alabama Community College System; Bates College; Montana University System; North Carolina Community College System; Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission; Tennessee Higher Education Commission; University of North Carolina at Greensboro; University of Wisconsin-Madison
Questions about this project?
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