Are elite colleges finally looking for rural students? NPR and Hechinger say "yes"

NPR's Elissa Nadworny and the Hechinger Reports' John Marcus filed this story from Crossville, Tennessee, population 12,000.  The story features high-school student Isabella Cross: 

As a 17-year-old in a rural community, and the daughter of a single parent, "I always kind of felt, like, I wouldn't say necessarily trapped, but a lot of kids feel trapped," says Cross. "And a lot of them never get out. They never get to explore and never get to see other things."

Now, Cross thinks applying to a top-flight college might be possible after all.

Recruiters from some of the nation's most selective universities — MIT, the University of Chicago, Yale — have, for the first time, come to her "little no-name town." It's part of an effort by top schools to pay more attention to rural America, where students are less likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to go to college and, if they do, are more likely to drop out.

"It kind of just felt like they heard us, and they see us, and that they know that there's a need as well for small-town kids like me to have really big dreams," says Cross.

The college fair in Crossville this fall was part of a string of events throughout the state, where admissions officers from about a half-dozen of the nation's most selective universities visited with students and parents. It was among the first by a new consortium called STARS, or Small Town and Rural Students College Network, prompted by a $20 million grant from a University of Chicago trustee.

It follows a long history of neglect of rural areas by many colleges and universities. Not even public research universities recruit in rural places, a 2019 study by scholars at UCLA and the University of Arizona found, disproportionately favoring higher-income public and private high schools in major metropolitan areas.

The story is chock full of quantitative data about rural students, and then there's this telling vignette: 

Outside the high school's auditorium, Nae Evans Sims stopped and thought for a moment about the smallest community she'd ever visited as an admissions recruiter for Case Western Reserve University. "Oh, my gosh," she says. "Probably this one."

A prior post about rural students and college placement is here.