A great deal of commentary has been offered up in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision a few weeks ago to overturn its 1978 decision in Bakke v. Regents of the University of California. Some of the commentary has (helpfully in my opinion) focused on the fact that the vast majority of college students do not attend--indeed, do not even apply to attend--the selective institutions that use affirmative action to decide who gets admitted. Only about 200 use affirmative action in admission decisions.
Here's one of those pieces of commentary from the New York Times, by Richard Arum and Mitchell L. Stevens, with graphics by Quoctrung Bui, that addresses a phenomenon that has a big impact on rural students: most students go to colleges and universities near their families. The relevant excerpt follows:
What drives this dynamic is that most students apply to and enroll at schools near their families, regardless of whether the school is a good academic fit. We live in a country full of colleges that don’t have the resources and academic quality to match their students’ talents. Social scientists describe this problem in the college selection process as “undermatching.” Efforts to nudge students to broaden their horizons and consider attending selective colleges further from home have had only modest success.
That rural students are less likely to have a college or university nearby is one reason that these students are less likely to undertake--and to finish--a bachelor's degree.
A 2020 post about rural students' access to higher education, with references to affirmative action and embedded links to many prior posts, is here. This post from 2018--when the cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina went to trial--discusses the value rural students add--or don't--to elite institutions.
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