Chronicle of Higher Education features LSU-Alexandria as an institution successfully serving rural students

Dan Berrett reports on Louisiana State University-Alexandria's success in surviving the rural area amidst which it sits.  The headline is Rural America, Growth Area? and the sub-head is "There’s a growing population of high-school seniors waiting to be reached — if colleges can figure out how to better serve them."  Here are some key excerpts:  

On the surface, Louisiana State University at Alexandria might seem like an institution in trouble. It’s a public regional campus in a rural swath of the state, located in a city of under 50,000 that hugs the Red River and is “surrounded by forest and farmland,” says Adam Lord, a spokesperson for the university. Central Louisiana, according to Lord, is “defined by work-force shortages, growing health-care deserts, and limited access to degree programs.” Less than one-third of the city’s adults have at least an associate degree, below both the state and national average.

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.

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The notion that rural areas are growing runs counter to a decades-long narrative of decline.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

I really appreciate the attention here to rurality as identity, which is consistent with a recent finding by political scientists regarding rural voters.