Welcome to Mile Markers, a twice-a-month newsletter about rural higher education.

For me, growing up as a 4-H kid meant summers walking sheep around a makeshift ring in the barn, spending evenings in a brightly-lit meeting room learning about everything from animal nutrition to how to deliver a lamb from inside a cardboard box meant to resemble the backside of a ewe, and then of course that day of the county fair when sawdust lingered in the air, and we awaited the hour we finished showing sheep and could run to order a black raspberry ice cream cone.

A blurry Emily from at least a decade ago presenting at a Chester County 4-H sheep club meeting.

A gorgeous ice cream cone at the Chester County 4-H fair in 2015.

Halter-training sheep with my siblings (who are not pictured).

But I knew 4-H clubs across the country went far beyond the livestock clubs that I was familiar with – and in many ways, they have played a significant role in leadership and career development for young people, especially in rural areas. So, I started to ask some questions about what that looks like.

That’s how I learned about one unique version of a 4-H club that recently launched in Weld County, Colorado, and aims to prepare youth and their families for life after high school.

Juntos 4-H is now a national 4-H program that began at North Carolina State University almost 20 years ago. Translating to “together” in Spanish, Juntos started as a response to high dropout rates among Latino and Hispanic youth in North Carolina. After surveys and focus groups involving hundreds of Latino youth and their families, leaders at NC State Extension launched small-scale workshops that brought parents and youth together to learn more about navigating the educational system from middle school to high school and beyond. These workshops started in high schools with an early focus on three rural counties in the state.

As it grew in North Carolina, Juntos added other elements like a “summer academy” where students would visit a land grant university like NC State. Then, after the National 4-H Council came on board and funding arrived from the New York Life Foundation, dedicated Juntos 4-H clubs spread across the country. Other land grant universities and extensions began replicating the Juntos model, starting with Oregon State University in 2012.

Juntos 4-H also incorporated other elements like one-on-one coaching and mentoring and more recent programming focused on career readiness and workforce development.  

A timeline that shows how Juntos 4-H developed from a North Carolina program to a nationwide model. Photo courtesy of Juntos 4-H.

As it has evolved, the driving force of Juntos 4-H seems to still be family involvement. In Colorado, it’s common for parents, younger siblings and other family members to show up to the sessions for high school and middle school students. (One former Juntos trainer, Lisa Auer in Larimer County, Colorado, said she has even provided childcare in the past to help ensure access for families).

This isn’t a program that reaches students and families by email, either. Juntos coordinators post flyers and present at back-to-school nights. Sometimes they hold meetings at soccer fields or churches. They use WhatsApp groups to communicate between workshops. Depending on what the families prefer, the sessions can be in Spanish, English or both.

Meals and music are also common. Patrick Pulis, the 4-H outreach instructor who leads Juntos 4-H in Weld County, described a recent scene where a student and his father volunteered to play guitar, amp and all, at the beginning of a session. Ruben Flores, who now works in a different role at Colorado State University Extension but helped research and launch Juntos 4-H across Colorado, echoed how this story exemplified the overall environment at Juntos 4-H clubs.

“The typical recruiting that you would use for 4-H: you put your single out, so to speak, and wait for people to come to you. That’s not what Juntos 4-H does,” Flores said. “We go into the communities.”

For example, Jafet Sanchez is a 10th grader who went through Weld County’s inaugural workshop for high school students in January. He said he learned about the program through an English Language Learner lab at his school. 

Sanchez said he attended the Juntos workshops with both his parents, and while he learned more about different careers he hadn’t considered before – like engineering jobs – the biggest learning curve was likely for his parents who he said were completely new to the educational system in the United States.

“It was difficult to understand at first but when they got into the [Juntos] program, it was easier,” he said.

Students and families involved in Weld County’s Juntos 4-H workshops met in the Centennial Board of Cooperative Educational Services’ building in Greeley. Photo courtesy of Weld County CSU Extension.

In that first iteration of the workshops, Pulis said he was impressed by the shift he saw between parents and their children, how their conversations became more lively as the sessions went on.

“Families may not talk to their youth very much about their education or their future, and something like Juntos gets them starting to think about how can the parent be involved with the youth education, how can they support them, how can they talk to them on a daily basis about their schoolwork, about being successful,” he said. 

While Juntos got its start from serving Latino and Hispanic communities, and it continues to thrive in areas of high Spanish-speaking populations (like Weld County, one of the fastest growing areas in the state with just over 9% of the population born outside of the U.S.), multiple people involved with the program emphasized that Juntos is not exclusive.

“Even though the word Juntos is in Spanish, we’re not going to turn any family away if they want to help their son or daughter look at educational options,” said Flores.

One county left

When Colorado adopted Juntos in 2021, it took off in multiple counties over the next couple of years, often finding strong partnerships with local high schools and the family liaisons that supported students and their families there. Now, though, Weld County is the only active Juntos 4-H program in Colorado. 

Weld County’s Juntos 4-H held its first workshops for high school students in January and will launch middle school workshops this fall. Photo courtesy of Weld County CSU Extension.

In 2023, seeking longer-term sustainability, Juntos 4-H shifted to a national consortium model, meaning states and counties needed to pay to access the programming and evaluation support from the national level, administered at NC State. With that model change, six states (plus Weld County) joined the consortium. Some remained independent and still others halted their Juntos programs, pointing to a lack of funding.

Larimer County was one of the places where Juntos 4-H initially thrived but could not continue to financially support a full-time coordinator, according to Auer, community development specialist at CSU Extension’s Larimer County Office.

“The program was great,” Auer said. “It didn’t stop for lack of need but capacity and funding.”

Weld County was different because they received a large anonymous donation from an energy company based in the area. The company specifically earmarked those funds to run a Juntos 4-H program in the county where that company employed many families who would benefit from a program like this, according to Flores.

At the national level, Juntos 4-H is following other extension programs in looking to move away from a reliance on federal grants and instead focus more on philanthropy from corporations and foundations. 

Some like Flores, who now travels the state to connect with rural students about college opportunities (even beyond CSU) as part of the Access to Education program, are hopeful that the recent launch of Juntos 4-H in Weld County is the sign of more efforts like it.

“I’m looking forward to the day when Patrick says, ‘Hey, we have somebody that went through Juntos 4-H, and they want to know more about those educational options.’ Because it would almost be like being part of that relay where we’re passing the baton, if you will,” Flores said. “In the meantime, I’m going to continue to go into schools in Weld County and tell them about Juntos 4-H or the work that we do, and you never know, the program in Weld County may grow.”

What I’m reading and attending

Speaking of funding, this story from the Daily Yonder highlights how a $10 million gift to the University of Alabama seeks to address primary care shortages in rural communities. The main focus is on attracting medical students to the training program at Alabama in hopes that they will stay and work there, but the Yonder article has a lot more detail on this. 

Rural healthcare is a complex challenge, and while proximity to medical training is likely part of the solution, I’m curious what you’re seeing in your areas. Let me know by responding to this email, or making a post in the new community space.

Another story I’m keeping an eye on is Oklahoma’s tenure ban. Oklahoma Watch reported on the potential impact on rural regional universities and community colleges after the governor prohibited them from granting tenure to new hires. 

And let me know if you’ll be at Radically Rural Oct. 6-8! I’m thinking about planning a casual meet-up for those who want to talk about rural higher ed. 

Let’s talk more this fall about …

I’ll be back in a couple weeks, and in the meantime, feel free to share Mile Markers with anyone else who might be interested, or subscribe here if you were forwarded this email.

And if there are story ideas you think I should chase or topics you want to see more about (or if you simply want to say hello), always feel free to reply to this email. It goes right to my inbox.

Thanks for reading and loving rural. And have a beautiful Labor Day weekend!

Talk soon,

Emily

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a twice-a-month newsletter about rural higher education.

And welcome back to school for all the educators returning to classrooms. Living in a college town in Missouri for the past few years, I can always anticipate the shift – and it’s not only the fact that the line at my favorite bagel spot is a little longer.

If you’ve been following along, you know that I’ve been in learning mode since starting as the rural engagement reporter at Open Campus, talking to as many people as I can and reading about all things rural higher ed. After many of these conversations, I’ve left feeling inspired about how especially rural community colleges are building strong partnerships with other local organizations and employers – as well as K-12 schools.

If we haven’t had the chance to meet yet, I would love to say hello! Feel free to email me or find a time on my calendar to chat here.

I recently spoke with Barb Klein, provost at Ellsworth Community College in Iowa Falls, Iowa, because Ellsworth was granted $1 million from the state’s Career Academy Incentive Fund earlier this month. The funding will mostly go toward renovating the school’s existing trades and industry building to create a regional career center.

These regional centers are typically based at a community college or high school and serve as a central location where students from multiple school districts can access career and tech courses at the high school and college level. 

Specifically, the CTE courses are grouped in series known in Iowa as career academies. At Ellsworth, the four career academies that will be offered when the center plans to open in fall of 2027 are: construction technology, agricultural science, welding and entrepreneurship. This means students could enroll in a career academy in their junior year of high school and graduate in two years with a welding certificate, for example. 

Since the fund was established as part of a statewide penny sales tax in 2019, Iowa’s Department of Education has distributed up to $5 million each year to support these partnerships between community colleges and high schools. You can read more about the career academies and regional centers here.

The access piece of this – the fact that it was regional – was what interested me the most, especially for rural students. To qualify for this particular grant, colleges must reach at least 120 students or four school districts, often expanding their reach beyond the most populated areas. 

Most of these centers are offering in-person instruction – and it varies whether high schools can provide transportation – but some have opportunities for online learning like Triton Academy at Iowa Central Community College or Des Moines Area Community College’s Templeton Regional Center. In Templeton, a town with fewer than 400 people, college leaders saw the center as an opportunity to connect students living in small towns with both training and local employers, according to reporting from Iowa Capital Dispatch.

Klein similarly said she anticipates the center could help more high school students in Iowa Falls – which has a population of 5,000 – and beyond become aware of local career opportunities, as well as boost enrollment for the college.

“It’s a difference maker for us,” she said. “When we think about the greater good of trying to get more of a skilled workforce across the state of Iowa, it’s a win for the high schools, and it’s a win for us.”

A map showing Iowa’s regional centers built or renovated with support from the Career Academy Incentive Fund.

Klein said she was also encouraged by the support from local employers, especially those in the construction industry, who expressed how excited they were to see more students trained in construction and ready to work. Much of Ellsworth’s grant will go toward building out a construction training space so students can practice things like framing a room or plumbing.

Since 2019, 11 colleges and two school districts have received funding to either renovate or build new regional centers. Many of these projects also leaned on local referendums, other state and federal grants, community foundations, and support from local business leaders or regional development organizations and chambers of commerce.

Iowa has been in the national news lately as the first state to receive federal approval for its proposed Workforce Pell programs.  (A related reminder that Open Campus has a free, six-part Workforce Pell briefing if you’re looking for a deeper dive on that). But these regional centers are one example of how the state legislature has been focused on workforce readiness even before Workforce Pell.

Let’s talk more this fall about …

I'm planning a virtual call sometime this fall so we can all connect and share ideas beyond the newsletter. And I could use some help choosing a focus for this conversation. What topics most interest you?

• Ways colleges/universities are supporting their rural students (could be financially or culturally, relating to a sense of belonging/community)

•  How higher ed can play a role in meeting rural needs like housing or health care (a big one, I know, but maybe we can find some case studies or examples!)

• Creative partnerships between rural colleges and community/place-based organizations, nonprofits, employers, etc.

• Something else I haven't mentioned yet?

What I’m reading and attending

This story out of KTSM in Texas helped me understand the financial losses community colleges are facing after the state legislature failed to appropriate sufficient funding. I would be interested in hearing more from rural colleges about how this new outcomes-based model is playing out beyond the bigger cities.

Also on the funding thread, I recognized some rural colleges in this Nebraska Examiner story about how an anticipated 5% cut across all of Nebraska’s state agencies could impact community colleges.

And this Hechinger Report opinion piece from Meredith Archer Hatch and Alyssa Ratledge was the perfect follow-up, expressing the importance of research and evaluation of what is working in rural communities – especially as rural institutions work to stretch dwindling dollars further. 

Last week, I attended a webinar from Thrive Community Partners via Radically Rural where the presenters shared some practical tips for increasing students’ awareness about career opportunities, like career baseball cards and employer fact sheets.  I’ll be at the Radically Rural Summit Oct. 6-8 and would love to see some of you there!

Lend a helping hand

Do you have an opportunity to volunteer, donate or get involved to support rural learners? I’m happy to connect people with these open doors. For example, in the last edition, we shared an opportunity to review scholarship applications or serve as a mentor with Native Forward. Send me an email if you have something to share.

Rural places to see on my upcoming roadtrip?

I’m planning a road trip from Missouri to southeastern Pennsylvania. And it made me think about how some of my favorite places I’ve visited were small towns. For example, I fell in love with Wardensville, WV, last summer when my siblings and I stayed nearby. Okay, specifically I fell in love with the blueberry rolls at Wardensville Garden Market. 

The blueberry roll of my dreams.

Do you have favorite small towns or suggestions for stops as I make my way to PA this fall? Reply to this email (I promise it goes only straight to my inbox), and let me know.

I’ll be back in a couple weeks, and in the meantime, feel free to share Mile Markers with anyone else who might be interested, or subscribe here if you were forwarded this email.

Thanks for reading and loving rural.

Talk soon,

Emily

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a twice-a-month newsletter about rural higher education.

This week, I found myself in the basement of a hospital learning about the sterilization of surgical equipment, gazing up at a towering combine in a shop at a John Deere dealership and listening to a kid roaring like a lion while they worked on speech therapy at a pediatric clinic.

That’s because more than 150 high school advisers from across Missouri were participating in industry tours as part of training from the national nonprofit, rootEd Alliance, that supports them. And I got to tag along, visiting various job sites around Warrensburg, Missouri. 

Some of my favorite moments were watching the gears turn in these advisers’ heads as they listened to managers share what high school students should know about their jobs. For example, every nurse and radiation therapist in oncology emphasized that their jobs were not always sad ones. They felt grateful to see their same patients week after week, to get to know them and their families on a personal level and to be a source of brightness in their days. They talked about how they were a part of a team and rarely worked alone. Meanwhile, the advisers nodded their heads and appeared to think about what this would mean for their students as they plan life post graduation.

A physical therapist and occupational therapist talk about their work at The Pediatric Place in Knob Noster, Missouri, as part of the rootEd Missouri industry tours. Photo by Emily Lytle

But these tours, which ranged across agriculture, health care, public safety and aviation and military tracks, were more than just opportunities to gather information. The hope was that the advisers would consider bringing similar hands-on experiences to their students across rural Missouri, according to Nicole Snider, regional director for rootEd Missouri.

“[They can] take this back and translate it for their own region: What do I have locally that offers similar types of careers or opportunities for my students, and how can I replicate a certain type of visit?” Snider said. “It opens the door for them a little bit more to do some more digging on their own.”

Ag-Power, a John Deere dealer in Centerview, Missouri, hosted a group of Missouri rootEd advisers on a tour of the shop, supply and show rooms. Photo by Emily Lytle

This focus on hands-on experiences like industry tours and job shadowing is part of a shift that rootEd has noticed on a national level. The nonprofit asks the advisers to track student activities throughout the year, and a recent analysis of that data –  alongside student survey responses – showed that students with hands-on career experiences were nearly 10% more likely to report high certainty about their post-graduation plans than students who only participated in things like career fairs or guest speakers.

Because of this, rootEd has been focusing more on building relationships between high schools and employers in their communities. 

How it works

But as many of you know, adding more tasks to advisers’ and counselors’ already full plates is not often an option. Here’s how it works with rootEd.

In Missouri, rootEd collaborates with the state education department, Ozarks Technical Community College and Missouri Chamber of Commerce to train dedicated career advisers who meet with every senior in their high school. This often looks like help filling out scholarship and college applications, but it’s increasingly meant sharing work experiences with students to help them identify next steps after high school. For example, Janine Castillo at Hume High School recently organized a trip to Ellet Memorial Hospital where students got to try their hand at a few different medical scenarios.

Susan Rupert, who advises between 60 and 70 seniors at Lathrop High School, said these job experiences are so vital to students knowing what they want to do. If they think they want to be a veterinarian, for example, they need to do more than hold a cat, she said.

For many of these advisers, this work is personal. Both Rupert and Castillo are now working at high schools where they graduated. Another adviser, Tasha Ortiz, said she thinks about her upbringing on a dairy farm in southern Missouri and how much guidance she wished she had as a first-generation college student. 

These stories aren’t unique to Missouri, either. When I was getting started in this role, I talked to Sarah Ligas, who leads Advise TN, a state-run program in Tennessee that places career advisers in high schools. She talked about how many advisers were once teachers, but some were retired police chiefs or other public servants who cared about the future of kids in their communities. This program also noted that the likelihood of college enrollment increased especially for rural students, by 6.4%, when working with Advise TN advisers.

Both these programs, while different in funding and model, seem to have similar messages: There is value in investing in rural students with dedicated advisers who can help them navigate life after high school.

Employers can invest, too

We also saw some examples of how employers are stepping up to support students in their community. For example, if a student wants to participate in the John Deere TECH program, they need to have a dealership like Ag-Power sign off as their “sponsor,” meaning the student is promising to complete work experience there. 

While the terms of this sponsorship differ dealer to dealer, Ag-Power offers their students a starter tool chest worth $4,000. As long as they work for Ag-Power for three years, they can keep that chest. As tuition reimbursement, Ag-Power also offers bonuses in $2,000 payments each year they work post-graduation until it totals $10,000.

Still, only a handful of Ag-Power’s employees have gone through that John Deere-specific program, largely because the nearest colleges that offer it are in Kansas and Nebraska.

RootEd advisers in Missouri tour The Pediatric Place in Knob Noster, Missouri, a community with fewer than 3,000 residents. Photo by Emily Lytle

Other employers like The Pediatric Place offered internship and volunteer opportunities for students in high school through college and graduate school, building years-long relationships with students.

Brittany Hendrick, marketing manager at The Pediatric Place, said staff will travel from as far as Springfield (an hour and a half from the Clinton location) because they want to work somewhere that offers all the various pediatric disciplines in one place. But she said she wishes more people realized the opportunities already existing in rural places where they live.

“I really wish that people knew they did not have to go to the city to have a good paying job,“ she said. “There are opportunities out there. You just have to look.”

What I’m reading

I often look forward to what Chris Breitmeyer has to say in his monthly updates for the Rural Community College Alliance, but I especially enjoyed reading his newsletter this week. Here’s a snippet, and you can sign up here if you haven’t already:

“Our responsibility is much broader than preparing students for their first day of work. We prepare them for careers that will evolve, industries that will change, and communities that depend upon educated citizens as much as skilled employees.”

This spotlight on Western Nevada College similarly shared how rural community colleges have a unique advantage in their tendency to be quick to collaborate with local communities.

And this story from Open Campus partner WUNC caught my attention because it highlighted how the cooperative extension in North Carolina continues to make an impact despite federal funding cuts. I’m interested in following these “digital agricultural innovation hubs,” which Brianna Atkinson mentions at the end of the story as a way the state is looking to connect farmers with the latest agricultural technologies.

Have reading recommendations? I’d love to hear them. You can share them in our new community space here or send me an email.

_______________________________

Workforce Pell is here. What does it mean for you? Sign up for our free, six-part briefing to learn more about how to take advantage of this new opportunity.

_______________________________

Lend a helping hand

I’m trying something different for the newsletter: sharing opportunities to get involved, volunteer or participate in community with others. Have an opportunity you want to share? Send me an email.

Native Forward is looking for volunteers and mentors!

Are you passionate about supporting the next generation of Native leaders? Native Forward, the largest provider of direct scholarships to Native Students,  is seeking dedicated volunteers and mentors.

Whether you're reviewing scholarship applications as a reader or guiding a scholar as a mentor, Native Forward would love to add more people to the community invested in the success of Native students across the country. 

Reach out to Christa at christa@nativeforward.org to get involved.

Thanks for reading and loving rural.

Talk soon,

Emily

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a twice-a-month newsletter about rural higher education.

I’m coming to you after my yearly sibling trip, this time to Nova Scotia, where I had one of the coolest experiences: bioluminescent sea kayaking. Can you feel my enthusiasm in this photo?? Hope your summers are also full of adventures or relaxation time with people you love.

The author of this newsletter on a recent adventure in Nova Scotia.

In this edition, I will share about a 10-year-old  program in Virginia that is similar — yet different — to Workforce Pell. One that community college leaders in the commonwealth told me they’d rather focus on than this expanded federal grant that has especially rural community colleges raising eyebrows about its immediate effectiveness.

But before that, I have a request: Will you try something with me? In our initial audience survey, some of you mentioned that you’d appreciate having a discussion board-like space where you can connect with one another.

Beehiiv (the platform where we send this newsletter) just launched a new product that may help us put all of this in one place. You can check it out here. It’s free: all you have to do is plug in your email, verify, and you’ll have access.

I put the question from last week’s newsletter there if you’d like to share about a college or university that serves its rural community in a meaningful way. Now, all you have to do is comment, and you can even add photos if you wish! 

Check it out and let me know what you think!

For many rural learners, they need a few essential things to access job training: funding to pay for the program, reliable transportation, proximity to the college and an assurance that this will be worth their time and money. Specifically, will this credential actually lead to a higher-paying role?

Keith Harkins, vice president of academic and workforce programs at Southside Virginia Community College, said Virginia’s FastForward program is checking those boxes.

“It’s a massive economic development game changer for our rural communities,” Harkins said. 

FastForward, which is the Virginia Community College System’s name for the statewide program born from a bill passed in 2016, helps residents access short-term training for high-demand jobs in the state. The student pays for one third of the cost of the program — usually a training somewhere between 6 and 12 weeks that works toward an industry-recognized credential — and then the state pays the rest.

The state releases the next portion of that grant when the student completes the training, and the final amount when the student earns the certificate or license. 

Community colleges across Virginia offer these short-term training programs for earning industry-recognized credentials. This screenshot shows the service areas of those colleges.

Until FastForward came about, Harkins said there was no real financial support for short-term programs. Community colleges like Southside had to stretch nurse aide programs, for example, to fit into a semester. Once they converted it to a non-credit program, Harkins said they saw five times as many graduates.

Randy Stamper, associate vice chancellor for career education and workforce programs with Virginia’s Community Colleges, said that this model has been especially helpful for rural students. Nearly 40% of all FastForward students are enrolled at one of Virginia’s 14 rural colleges, according to Stamper.

Some community colleges like Brightpoint and Reynolds, which serve rural students but are located near Richmond, see even more opportunities to connect these students with FastForward. Elizabeth Creamer, who is the vice president of workforce development for the division serving both those colleges, said they have a mobile lab, but they need to find ways to get rural students to the campus where they can access things that can’t fit on a truck — like heavy equipment simulators or pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment.

FastForward also reports an average $14,869 increase in wages after completing one of these programs that are often more affordable for students. Still, Creamer said it’s often the full-time benefits that come with these jobs, including sick leave, that makes the biggest difference for FastForward graduates.

This chart from Virginia’s Community Colleges’ 2026 fact sheet on FastForward shows the average increase in wages by industry. Courtesy of Virginia’s Community Colleges.

Students can use other scholarships to pay for their portion of the program, and community colleges like Southside have built industry relationships that often step in to cover that first third, especially for students pursuing high-demand jobs like powerline work.

“Every single one of the electric cooperatives, just about, in Virginia has said, ‘If you get a student from our area, let us know. We’ll pay the first third,’” Harkins said.

Powerline training is one of the largest FastForward programs that Southside Virginia Community College offers. Courtesy of Southside Virginia Community College.

At Brightpoint and Reynolds, Creamer said they have more recently seen increased funding and support for their FastForward programs from businesses. Sometimes that’s in-kind support, such as job coaching and internship opportunities from the local medical center VCU Health.

One of the biggest challenges Virginia faces with FastForward is tracking when students complete their credential — a requirement for community colleges to receive that final payment. While 94% of students complete their courses, the average credential completion rate is 72%. In some cases, Stamper said students may not be taking the related exam, especially if they get offered a job before completing it. But this gap can also be attributed to the difficulty of tracking and communicating with the third parties that offer the exams.

Putting this into Workforce Pell context

FastForward is similar to Workforce Pell in that it is focused on accelerated training to help people earn a valuable credential for a high-demand and high-paying job. One area where it differs, Stamper said, is the length requirement. 

Eligible Workforce Pell programs must run at least 150 hours and last at least 8 weeks, but FastForward eligible programs are often shorter.

Even though many of the FastForward programs would likely meet the Workforce Pell requirements for completion and job placement, Stamper said these length requirements mean Virginia will be slow to adjust their programs to fit Workforce Pell.

“If you can enroll in a program, and in four weeks and 80 hours of instruction be successful in earning a commercial driver's license,” he said, “we are very reluctant to expand that to 150 hours and 8 or 9 weeks simply to access Workforce Pell because that is a burden on the student that is unnecessary.”

He also mentioned the paperwork burden: Many students applying for a non-credit short-term program do not fill out FAFSA, something that is required for Workforce Pell eligibility. 

That doesn’t mean Virginia is going to ignore Workforce Pell, completely either, though. 

“Do I see it ever replacing FastForward? No, and I don’t see it as being bigger than FastForward in Virginia,” Creamer said. “But I think it could be an additional tool for some programs that meet all of the criteria.”

The Commonwealth of Virginia has clearly noted the benefit of FastForward, too, increasing funding from $4 million to $40 million over the past decade. This is increased funding that community college leaders like Harkins want to see continue no matter what happens with Workforce Pell.

“I think this is the model,” Harkins said. 

Workforce Pell is here. What does it mean for you? Sign up for our free, six-part briefing to learn more about how to take advantage of this new opportunity.

A neat tool to explore

Speaking of knowing the value of your education: the new Certificate Earnings Explorer tool, which Open Campus built in partnership with The HEA Group, allows users to explore and compare the economic outcomes of thousands of undergraduate certificate programs. 

I’m excited to dig into this tool more, and if you check it out and see any rural trends worth noting, please let me know!

What I’m reading

When reporter Jason Gonzales told me he wanted to report on the mostly all-girls rodeo team at Colorado Mesa, I was so excited to read it. And his piece did not disappoint, sharing how this reflects a wider challenge of attracting rural men to four-year universities nationwide.

Indiana University Bloomington’s Center for Rural Engagement is doing some cool things, and I enjoyed reading about this oral storytelling partnership with the Indiana Landmarks Black Heritage Preservation Program. I’m looking forward to seeing the interactive story map they will build.

This feature in Community College Daily focuses on how some community colleges in North Carolina have helped small businesses recover after Hurricane Helene. I thought it was an excellent example of rural community colleges serving as a bridge between their community’s small businesses and vital resources, especially during emergencies. 

As always, send me an email if you want to chat more about rural higher education or collaborate in some way. Oh, and don’t forget to check out the new community space we’re trying out. You can always share thoughts on today’s newsletter there, too!

Thanks for reading and loving rural.

Talk soon,

Emily

P.S. Since I’m working from my family’s farm in Pennsylvania this week, here’s a bonus photo of a little growing pumpkin. Hope everyone enjoys the rest of July!

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a twice-a-month newsletter about rural higher education.

Something I heard while listening to folks across Montana last month is that rural employers  – from community banks to lumber mills – are seeking young people with proven soft skills. Just like corporate executives in bigger cities, managers in rural areas want to see students who show professionalism, problem-solving skills, financial literacy and more.

That’s why some rural school districts like North Ottawa County USD 239 in Kansas are introducing a new program this fall: an opportunity for students to earn credentials for soft skills learned in high school or middle school.

“One of the big ones that we heard about over and over again from managers when they did listening sessions – and we’ve done that in our community, as well – is this ability to resolve conflict and use emotional intelligence,” said Curtis Stevens, superintendent of North Ottawa County Schools.

A student participates in a mock interview as part of a program that teaches skills related to job and career readiness. Courtesy of Jobs for Maine Graduates.

While students may already be learning some of these skills, it can be difficult to show a student’s proficiency on a resume or high school transcript. But now, through this microcredentials model led by nonprofit GenUS, students can earn a digital badge that they can post on LinkedIn or include in college applications – just like they would for a certificate in, say, Microsoft Excel.

After this model got its start in Maine, more than 120 Kansas high schools associated with the nonprofit Jobs for America’s Graduates - Kansas are launching their own versions this fall. Craig Larrabee, CEO of GenUS, said they work with individual districts and schools to co-design programs that best meet their communities’ needs.

And this model will likely look different in each school. For example, North Ottawa County Schools serves about 600 students with just over 40 instructors  – numbers that will change a little when they add their first pre-K program this year. Instead of adding new courses on soft skills, Stevens said they are building these credentials into existing advisory periods that students already attend at the end of the day. They also plan to work with their career and technical student organizations like Future Farmers of America, HOSA - Future Health Professionals, SkillsUSA and Business Professionals of America.

An educator teaches soft skills as part of the Jobs for Maine Graduates program, which was where the microcredential model started. Courtesy of JMG.

Other school districts like York School Department, which serves about 1,500 students in coastal Maine, are establishing new classes that students rotate into with topics like job and career readiness. 

Tim Doak, superintendent in York, said he sees this as one way to make middle and high school education more meaningful for students.

“For a student, the confidence level is out of this world,” he said. “I think it means more than having a B plus or an A minus, because it means that I've done x, y and z to some standard, some preset skill set that was needed.”

Educators, students, employers and industry partners work together to shape how the soft skill instruction and credentialing will look, a process that each school uses before launching. Courtesy of JMG.

According to Larrabee, the adaptability is the beauty of this model, and both superintendents in rural Kansas and coastal Maine said they believed it could help level the playing field no matter what size school a student attends.

For example, Stevens said that larger districts in more metropolitan areas often can provide additional value like Advanced Placement courses, which can require more teachers. The microcredential option that builds on existing instruction can be a more flexible way to prepare students for their next step, whether that’s college or career.

“The best export of rural America right now, unfortunately, is its youth,” Stevens said. “So by [allowing] students to gain access to a mechanism that levels the validity of the education they’re receiving – such as microcredentials – we’re also able to continue to offer opportunities in rural areas that individuals can return to.”

Larrabee said some colleges plan to accept the credentials for credit.

“We've known forever that durable skills, soft skills, are critical to success for young people. Now we have something that recognizes them, can be braided, can be evidence-based, and in a couple of months can be offered for college credit,” he said.

A question for you:

I've heard from several people that colleges can serve as the heartbeat of community in rural places. They are hubs for accessing arts and culture. Internet. Public meeting spaces. And more. 

I would love to hear about the special places where you've lived, worked or studied:

What I’m attending this month

On Thursday, July 23, I plan to attend Rural Assembly Everywhere. This is a virtual broadcast that I haven’t had a chance to attend yet but have heard amazing things about. You can check out the lineup and register for free here. 

What I’m reading

Soft skills must be the topic of the week because I came across this interesting report from MDRC that touches on a similar thread as the GenUS program I dug into above, but specifically targeting computer science and engineering courses in New Orleans.

Last month, I skimmed the surface of Workforce Pell as it relates to rural community colleges, but reporter Jacob Biba does an excellent deep dive into what this rollout looks like in North Carolina in his story for NC Local and Open Campus.

When I was in Montana a few weeks ago, I visited a family friend who lives on the Flathead Indian Reservation, and I loved flipping through the local newspaper Char-Koosta News. This story about an all-girls drone camp at the tribal college was one of my favorites.

And this piece from Heartland Forward helped me think a little differently about how video games and AI can help prepare rural students in Arkansas for the future. 

Alright, that’s all for now! As always, send me an email if you want to chat more about rural higher education or collaborate on a way to keep this conversation going.

Thanks for reading and loving rural.
Talk soon,

Emily

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a twice-a-month newsletter about rural higher education.

Driving through eastern Montana, miles of roads stretch past rolling hills and grasslands dotted with sparse vegetation or jagged rocks, and of course lots of open space.

Last week, I hopped in a car with a team of researchers from the Rural Talent Lab to hear directly from community members about how new opportunities for job training might best support the places they call home. 

As we worked our way up the east side of Montana, visiting Colstrip and Glasgow, and then across the state to the northwest region and Thompson Falls, it was clear how vital this listening approach will be to developing new pathways in rural communities.

What stood out to me the most were how stories differed from region to region and town to town within Montana. In many ways, industry has shaped the culture of these communities. Throughout Colstrip, signs like one that read “Coal helps us bake our bread” on Subway’s doors were plastered on buildings. So, if you didn’t notice the towering power plant, you knew that energy was part of this company town’s story. Compare that to Thompson Falls where tourism was the first word uttered as people talked through the affordable housing crisis and the difficulty to find workers during hunting seasons.

At the same time, though, some common threads ran as strong as the rushing rivers through Montana: pride in their communities, in the family-owned businesses, in the reservations and connection to history and culture.

These lessons have reaffirmed to me just how important it will be to approach storytelling about rural higher education in a similarly community-centered way.

Members of the Rural Talent Lab research team, who were conducting listening tours throughout Montana, visited a park in Colstrip.

What I heard along the way

In listening sessions with superintendents, business owners, community college leaders and more, we heard about what made these places special, and both the challenges and opportunities that persist. Meanwhile, other researchers walked around town and interviewed people at community centers, libraries, coffee shops and hardware stores.

More stories are already surfacing as I reflect on this trip, and I’m looking forward to reaching back out to some of the people I’ve met and reporting more in future newsletters. I also hope to follow this project and compare how the pathways that the state implements in fall 2027 match what we’ve heard. 

For now, I wanted to take you inside the conversations we had with residents around the state. These research-focused “town halls” were not public meetings, and participants’ feedback remained anonymous. Because of this, you will notice that I do not often attribute comments to specific people in my reflections.

Rural engagement reporter Emily Lytle takes a group selfie with the Rural Talent Lab team, from left: Kai Schafft, Adam Ray, Ty McNamee, Andrew Koricich, Rohit Kataria and Kelsey Kunkle.

There’s rural. And then there’s ‘frontier rural.’

When we arrived in eastern Montana, people in both Glasgow and Colstrip wanted us to know one thing: Eastern Montana is different. It’s not like western Montana, and it’s certainly not like other rural places in the country. It’s more frontier than rural, more than one person said.

People shared that this shaped their rural identity but also their challenges. 

People who live in Lame Deer, which is on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, said they are 104 miles from a Walmart. At school districts in the area, there is such a lack of population density that multiple high schools have combined to form one football team. 

Children’s drawings for wildfire awareness adorned shop windows in Glasgow, Montana.

When someone needs to go to the dentist in Glasgow, sometimes they take the Amtrak train to reach care. Other times, people must fly an hour and a half from the town branded as the “Middle of Nowhere” to see a specialist in Billings via Cape Air, an essential air service that Montana Free Press reported on in 2019. 

Because of this distance from town to town, many people across the three towns we visited said they take pride in their self-reliance and ability to wear many hats. In Glasgow, Gregg Hunter serves as a state senator – representing a district that takes at least two and a half hours to drive across — but he also works in public relations, sits on the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, works as an EMT, and is the town’s locksmith. And he’s not the only one with a resume that long.

My understanding was that “frontier” related to remoteness but also people’s abilities to rely on each other for the services they need.

Rural sociologist Kai Schafft, who facilitated the community listening sessions with Rural Talent Lab deputy director Adam Ray, outside of the new Business Innovation Center in Colstrip.

Collaboration and community will drive the way. Because it already has.

In Colstrip, a leader at a small tribal college told a story about a parent who knows that when she needs to bring her child to classes, she can hand the baby off to one of the staff or faculty. 

Montana has seven tribal colleges, and despite some having enrollment below 300 students, they often serve as the heartbeat of communities, providing not just education but cultural connection – and in this case, family support. (We explored the childcare challenges facing many Montana residents in this story reported in partnership with the Montana Free Press.) 

In Glasgow, people said they often tell others about how supportive their community is. If someone is sick and needs to raise money for surgery or treatment, they’ve seen people come together and raise as much as $60,000. The community has similarly rallied to support big projects like a new pool or wrestling center.

While the Rural Talent Lab and state leaders traveled across the state to learn more about how they might build new pathways to middle-skills credentials, one brief stop was Circle, Montana. 

In Circle, a town with fewer than 600 people that we passed through in eastern Montana, the EMT service is entirely volunteer-run. According to the county’s website, 16 volunteers have stepped up to serve.

People also recognized that often one institution or organization cannot do this alone. Business leaders in Thompson Falls, for example, applauded the school district for introducing students to new career paths, and they wanted to see the school do even more like establish a trade school. But they said they know, too, that their schools are severely understaffed and would need the support of business leaders and likely additional staff to make anything like that happen.

The community listening session in Thompson Falls was hosted at the high school.

The building where we met community members was also where the school’s new shop space was located.

In Colstrip, one community leader said she saw opportunity in programs that combined both remote learning and hands-on training through partnerships between the state university system and local employers. But while this has worked in some cases, like the veterinary tech program at Great Falls College - Montana State University, others acknowledged that it can be hard to find in-person training for other areas like EKG technicians or phlebotomists.

Across the state, scale is also a challenge that collaboration could solve. How do you argue for an investment in a plumbing program when your community only needs two plumbers? Some suggested that partnering across institutions, creating regional collaborations with colleges and employers, may help address this.

In Colstrip, the team visited the community center, the library and the history and art museum.

But the solution may look different for each community. It is up to the state team, who listened into each session and will receive feedback from the research team in September, to decide whether they will implement pathways that are hyperlocal, regional or statewide. 

In Montana, it is likely that they will build on recent statewide changes prompted by last year’s STARS Act and related future-ready payments that incentivize K-12 schools to offer dual enrollment and trades-based learning. Angela McLean, director of American Indian/minority achievement and K-12 partnerships, has led a lot of these efforts. She joined three others representing the state on the tour last week: Joe Thiel, deputy commissioner for academic, research, and student affairs; Quincie Jones, executive director of career & technical education at Great Falls College and Eric Meredith, director of institutional analysis.

Basic needs must be met before we can talk about college, training or jobs

People also frequently told us that they want to stay in the rural places they love – especially when you add the cultural pull of tribal and ranching communities. However, for many, residents and community leaders said that’s not an option.

Gaps in access to affordable housing, childcare and healthcare came up in every site we visited – and Andrew Koricich, project director for Rural Talent Lab, said these themes were present when they visited West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kansas, too. 

Because you can’t talk about supporting a thriving rural community through education or training without recognizing the basic needs of the people who live there, including access to food and clean water. 

A view of the waters and mountains that have attracted so many people to northwest Montana towns like Thompson Falls.

Koricich and Adam Ray, deputy director of Rural Talent Lab, shared that there may be some opportunities to help meet those needs through training programs. For example, in Kansas, they toured a program at Fort Hays Tech that trained construction technology students to build affordable housing stock for their communities.

I also spoke with a few of the coaches from HCM Strategists who are working with the state teams to apply the findings from these listening tours, like Kathleen Cleary who talked about the potential of bringing community colleges, employers and other community partners together to help establish more child care services.

Now that the research team has wrapped up each of the listening tours, they will gather all the feedback and present it to the states this fall.

In the meantime, if you live in one of these states or want to talk about this project more, I would love to hear your thoughts. Please feel free to email me.

Thanks for loving rural communities, and I’ll be back in a couple weeks. As always, please send any story ideas or feedback my way.

All my best,

Emily

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a twice-a-month newsletter about rural higher education.

As I continue to develop my approach for this newsletter and build community around rural higher education stories, I’ve been lucky to have some great conversations lately. And I’m super excited to start talking to folks in person as I hit the road next week!

A couple weeks ago, I caught up with Andrew Koricich who is the principal investigator of the Rural Talent, Development and Attraction Lab. 

Starting in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kansas and Montana, the Rural Talent Lab plans to establish new pathways for middle-skills credentials – like associate degrees or certificates – that are responsive to what the rural communities in those states need.

To do this, the team has been conducting community listening tours throughout May and June. With three to four stops in each state, the team is hosting town halls with area college leaders, superintendents, chambers of commerce, economic or workforce development groups and others. They are also doing public opinion surveying across the states.

This approach, which The Daily Yonder wrote about when the project launched last year, appealed to me because it aligned with what a lot of you were sharing through the survey and our early conversations: We need to make sure we are recognizing that rural places are not a monolith, and one solution will not fit all.

That’s why I’m excited to share that I will be following along during the last community listening tour in Montana June 15-18.

I explain a little more about the trip in the video above, but so far I know the main stops will be Colstrip, Glasgow, West Glacier, Hungry Horse and Columbia Falls. Since I won’t be writing to you again until after the tour, you can follow the Open Campus Instagram for updates in the meantime.

If you have any questions or suggestions for me as I make my way through the state with the Rural Talent Lab team, please let me know. 

A map showing the stops on the Montana listening tour: Colstrip, Glasgow, W. Glacier, Hungry Horse and Columbia Falls.

This initiative is funded by a four-year $7.2 million grant from Ascendium Education Group, which is also a supporter of Open Campus.  It is a collaboration between the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association and HCM Strategists.

Workforce Pell and what it means for rural

Speaking of certificates and short-term programs, it’s hard to ignore the buzzy topic that’s got a lot of people eyeing that July 1 date circled on the calendar: the start of Workforce Pell, federal grants for short-term workforce training.

I’ve had the opportunity to talk to some people who are staying on top of the Workforce Pell news like Corey Gheesling at SHEEO and Iris Palmer at New America, and one thing is clear: This is complicated. And for rural colleges, the knotted tangle of rules may mean two things: 

1) They decide to wait it out and determine if it’s even worth the reporting burden – or the financial risk – to fit their programs to Workforce Pell. 

2) They start innovating and creating something new within the existing limitations.

Either way, the eligibility criteria do not seem to favor small and rural colleges, as both Palmer and Kristin Hultquist have pointed out in their pieces.

Over the next couple of weeks, when I’m not traveling, I will be looking to talk to more colleges about how they are thinking about Workforce Pell. If you want to chat or know someone who would have valuable insights to share, please reach out. Like I’ve mentioned before, I’m not as interested in rehashing the national policy conversation. You all get that news elsewhere. But if I can highlight rural perspectives and the specific ways that states or colleges are wading through Workforce Pell, I’d love that.

What’s on my calendar 

One way I’m excited about collaborating with others is through webinars or community calls online. Based on the survey responses, it looks like a lot of you find these virtual convenings valuable, too:

Send me an email if you are interested in co-hosting a webinar, or if you have an idea for a topic we should dig into together or an existing Zoom call I should know about. In the meantime, here are a couple that are penciled into my calendar. 

• June 17 at 1 p.m. ET: Measuring Rural America's Entrepreneurial Spirit from the Center on Rural Innovation.

• Aug. 12 at 2 p.m. ET: From Classroom to Career: Aligning Employers, Schools, and Community Pride in Rural Workforce Development

Feedback is more than welcome

As you may have noticed already, I’m all about experimenting. So as this email lands in your inbox every other week, I hope you’ll bear with me and let me know what is resonating and what’s not.

And if you’re new here, welcome! I would still love to hear from more folks about what you’re looking for in a newsletter like this and how you like to find news and connect with others. 

Don’t hesitate to reach out to stay hello or forward this email to someone you think would be interested. Oh, and if you missed last week’s newsletter or a previous edition, you can find them here.

Thanks to everyone who has been so gracious with their time and insights as I navigate the many acronyms of higher ed and identify stories to follow.

All my best,

Emily

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a twice-a-month newsletter about rural higher education.

I’m so glad you’re here. I hope the end of semesters, school years and other seasons are treating you well. 

Before we get to the rural health stories (and the many colorful maps) that I have to share, I would love to remind you to please take our survey so we can best understand how to cater this newsletter and other news products for you.  

Here’s a glimpse of what we’ve been hearing so far.

These answers have sparked another question:

Even before starting this role at Open Campus, I knew rural health would be a major storyline. 

As a reporter in Delaware and Maryland, I covered a few different stories about what a rural place loses when community hospitals close or struggle to recruit and retain staff. This can mean driving for hours to deliver babies, receive dialysis treatment or access life-saving screenings.

Take one look at the map of Health Professional Shortage Areas, and it’s clear that so many rural communities are experiencing this strain. But many higher ed institutions are working to help fill these gaps and invest in the next generation of rural health care workers.

I recently learned about one unique program to help build up the rural health care workforce in the region where Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri meet – not too far from where I now live in Columbia, Missouri. Last year, Kansas City University announced this new program called Rural Health Scholars. Instead of partnering with one institution, KCU is building relationships with eight different community colleges, as well as two four-year universities. 

Here’s how it works:

1. A student completes their first year of courses toward a medical degree (in osteopathic medicine or dental medicine) at a partner community college.

2. Then, they transfer to a four-year university – Pittsburg State University in Kansas or Missouri Southern State University in Missouri – to complete their second and third year.

3. Next, they have the opportunity to interview early for a spot at KCU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine or College of Dental Medicine in Joplin, Missouri.

Catherine Satterwhite, executive director of the Center for Population Health and Equity at KCU, said this program will help increase access and accelerate the career pathways for students wanting to become doctors or dentists in rural communities. Typically, she said, students take a minimum of seven years to become a dentist and 10 years before practicing as a physician.

By providing a starting point closer to home, Satterwhite said the hope is more rural students will see this as a viable career path.

“We know that individuals who grow up in a rural area are more likely to ultimately live in a rural area and practice medicine or dentistry [there], right? So how can we create that really open door at the beginning?” Satterwhite said. 

To reach both rural students and those interested in serving rural communities, KCU is planning to visit health career fairs and work with high school counselors. But right now Satterwhite said the main focus is strengthening the relationships with the partner institutions.

“I think the things that we’re trying to figure out right now are probably not unique to us,” she said. “How can we align three different institutions and make sure that we are creating a high quality program that positions students for success? And then within KCU, what does it look like to engage students before they actually are part of our student body?”

Once the students are enrolled at KCU in Joplin, Satterwhite said the university wants to create a strong sense of community, providing students with clinical experience in rural communities but also connections with their alumni network for mentorship and shadowing. They are working with the Patterson Family Foundation to strengthen this rural programming.

While Rural Health Scholars is still in its early stages, I’m looking forward to reconnecting with Satterwhite once they start seeing students follow this new path.

What else I’m thinking and reading about:

The story above reminded me of another conversation I had this week with Jen Alger and Jennifer Bevis at the Blandin Foundation in Minnesota. We talked about many things, including how institutions and communities can reduce the distance that rural students have to travel to access the education and training they need. Some places are building stronger regional partnerships similar to KCU or offering online programming like a 4-year engineering degree.

What kinds of collaborations or innovations are you seeing in your communities to address shortages in the rural health care workforce?

Alger shared this great map from PolicyMap that really helps visualize the distances between community colleges and universities.

Speaking of maps, these maps from Sarah Melotte at The Daily Yonder were so helpful in highlighting the nuances that come with identifying rural places. Her article touches on the realities of funding challenges when rural areas are grouped together with metropolitan areas, especially when looking at health care shortages.

Of course, medical professionals are not the only need in many rural communities. In North Carolina, Brianna Atkinson at Open Campus partner newsroom WUNC wrote about a partnership between UNC Pembroke and five rural school districts to bring more science and math teachers to those communities.

One thing that has stood out to me in these readings and conversations is that tuition relief is only one part of investing in future rural workers. Many of these leaders across the country said that creating a sense of community among rural students, providing mentorship opportunities and supporting students’ other expenses like housing and transportation, are among other essential strategies.

Where we can connect

While the survey so far shows that many of you are like me and value opportunities to connect in person, we often have to rely on virtual spaces. But I have good news: there are some really great webinars and roundtables coming up.

Radically Rural hosts roundtables, and there are three coming up that I thought people in this community may be interested in:

• June 3 at noon ET: How Community Benefit Agreements Can Support Rural Communities with the Rural Assembly

• July 8 at 2 p.m. ET: Solutions Journalism in Rural Communities

• Aug. 12 at 2 p.m. ET: From Classroom to Career: Aligning Employers, Schools, and Community Pride in Rural Workforce Development

Also a shameless plug: Radically Rural has an in-person summit in Keene, NH, Oct. 6-8, and I will be there if you do want to connect in real life!

As many of you know, I’m only about a month into this role and trying to meet as many people as I can. So reach out to stay hello or forward this email to someone you think would be interested in rural storytelling. Oh, and did you miss last week’s newsletter or a previous edition? Find them here.

Talk to you again in a couple weeks!

Best,

Emily

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a twice-a-month newsletter about rural higher education.

Thank you to everyone who has scheduled time to chat with me or responded to the survey where I asked a few questions about your work and the ways you engage with news and community.

If you haven’t taken the survey yet, please do it today! Your insights are incredibly helpful as we’re reimagining this newsletter.

As I talk to more people and read your survey responses, I’m hearing that many of you value localized stories. Less big-picture and trendy policy stories. More specific examples of people and places that are tackling challenges in innovative ways. You want to compare what’s happening in your small town or rural community with others across the country. 

I love that. And if you see something happening in your community that I should know about, please reply to this email. To do this job well, I think collaboration — with local reporters and people doing the work on the ground — will be essential. 

Today’s story came to my attention through the RuralTogether community and the Rural & Small Town special interest group at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. 

At Chico State in Northern California, paid student ambassadors have led efforts to create a stronger sense of belonging and community among rural students on campus, strengthened outreach to rural high school students in the university’s 12-county service region and researched topics related to rural student success and identity.

Veronica Ulloa (left) helps lead an interactive session at the North State Student Ambassadors’ conference for high school students.

Kierra Alford and Isa O’Brion now both return to their home county to talk to high school students about attending a four-year university after they graduate.

These North State Student Ambassadors even hosted two conferences for high school students. Beyond the typical campus tours, these conferences included activities that helped rural students recognize the assets of living in rural places rather than focusing on what they lacked.

Listening to five students present at NACAC’s webinar last week, I felt inspired. These students were moving the needle on the same broad issues that leaders in the industry were sharing with me — like rural students’ enrollment and persistence in college and the tension to stay or leave their rural hometowns after graduation. 

I spoke with four of the student ambassadors — Veronica Ulloa, Kierra Alford, Isa O’Brion, and Nataly Garcia — about the difference that a sense of pride in your rural hometown makes and what they want decision-makers in higher ed to know about supporting rural youth. Here is one snippet of our conversation.

Emily Lytle: What difference do you think that makes having that sense of pride in where you're from when it comes to your success as a student?

Veronica Ulloa: A lot of time within the media or just everyday discussion with people, you look at being rural as a deficit, like: "We don't have access to wifi. We don't have a great internet connection. It's a food desert." But we do a lot of work in this group about flipping the narrative. When you come from a rural area, you have different characteristics. You're very scrappy. You have a great network of people to rely on. And even though seeing everybody at the grocery store sometimes can feel like a little much, you have a really big support system. There’s definitely a difference between a rural student and an urban student. And I think that it's important for higher education institutions to recognize that there are good qualities of a rural student. And it also took a lot for a rural student to get to higher education.

Isa O’Brion: Also, I got to work at different places. I worked at a local deli, I've worked at local schools, and then I worked as a janitor my senior year. So just different opportunities and skillsets I've gotten from those just because maybe I knew somebody and then they were hiring. And then since we do live in a lower-income community, we have so many scholarships because I wouldn't have been able to go to college, or at least a four-year university, my first year without that support.

Kierra Alford: When we host our conference or when we go back to speak in classrooms, it makes me really proud to be there because I was speaking to my past self in a way. These are a bunch of things that we do now that I wish we would've got to experience when we were in high school. So being able to do that and seeing their faces light up when someone's talking about college from a student perspective … Being able to be that person for them is super empowering and it just makes me want to be successful.

Nataly Garcia: Having a sense of pride, just how everybody has been saying, it just gives you a stride to keep going. Just from coming from a small town, even in high school, I felt like they kind of treated us like, "Oh, well, they're just going to end up doing a trade, or, they're just going to end up staying here forever." 

And don't get me wrong, maybe I do end up retiring in Los Molinos. Even just going back, it is something I see myself doing. But I think it's always showing people that you can do it. I know there were underclassmen that would talk to me about it and be like, "Oh, how'd you get this scholarship? How'd you do it? How'd you get into college? What'd you say? What'd you do?” And it's like, okay, these people are slowly starting to look up to other people.

Dispatch from Emily

This week, I’m visiting my family in southern Chester County, Pennsylvania. One of my favorite places to go with my mom is the Oxford Produce Auction, and this week it was overflowing with vibrant flowers ahead of Mother’s Day. It’s also a great spot to get a scrapple breakfast sandwich (if you know, you know).

If you have photos or messages of what’s happening in your rural community, I would love to see them. 

Thanks, and as always, don’t hesitate to hit reply or schedule a time to chat if you want to talk more about the reimagining of this newsletter or higher ed in rural communities.

All my best,

Emily

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a biweekly newsletter about rural higher education.

I’m just a little over a week into my role as the rural engagement reporter at Open Campus, and I’m really looking forward to what we’re going to build here together. If we haven’t met yet, my name is Emily Lytle. I’m a journalist with roots in southeastern Pennsylvania who is currently living in Columbia, Mo.

As I familiarize myself more with the rural higher ed beat, I’m starting to dream up ways for Mile Markers to be a source of connection and community. More than a list of recent stories — though original reporting will certainly be part of this — my vision is for this newsletter to be a dock or landing of sorts. A place where we begin to exchange ideas before diving deeper into collaboration.

Somewhere on the Missouri River during a magical moonlight canoe trip in June 2024.

What does that look like? Honestly, I’m not sure yet. I have some ideas buzzing around my brain — maybe it’s finding creative ways to meet online or in-person, or exploring new platforms or methods for communicating?

But above all, I would love for you to be a part of this process. Would you take this brief survey to tell me a little more about yourself and how you like to engage with both news and people?

If you’d rather hop on a 15-minute call, you can book a time here. If none of those times work for you, hit reply on this email, and we can set something up.

And if you want extra kudos from me, share it with a colleague or friend who also cares about rural higher education and job training. Thanks a million!

What I’ve been reading:

Two Philadelphia health giants enter race for Delaware medical school

As I talk to people about what stories I should be covering in rural higher ed, one has come up more than others: how institutions are working to attract and retain health care workers in rural areas. Since I worked as a reporter in southern Delaware, covering stories like community hospitals limiting services, this story from Spotlight Delaware stood out to me. I’d love to hear what similar stories you are seeing in your communities.

More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, new projection shows

Of course, I love a story that starts with images of newborn lambs. This Hechinger Report story shows the real impact on students and the local economy when Sterling College in Vermont closes, as well as how it fits into the larger context of college closures.

This also reminded me of another story that caught my eye when scouring the Mile Markers archive, which told of the impact of WVU Tech leaving Montgomery, W.V. (A fun fact: I’m a triplet, and my siblings and I take a trip every year. Last year, we visited Fayetteville, W.V., which isn’t far from where this story takes place. Photo evidence below.)

My siblings and I walked across the same bridge that’s in Nick’s photo in the aforementioned story.

All my best,

Emily

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Emily Lytle

One of the first questions I asked when I interviewed for this job was: How are we defining rural? Because I know many people have strong feelings about how journalists put parameters on words like “rural,” “remote” and “small town.” So as I take on a role that focuses on colleges and universities across rural America, I wanted to share a glimpse of what I’ve been thinking about. 

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about my grandparents.

Don (Pop Pop) Lytle with one of his grandchildren on the family farm in Chester County, PA.

When I consider whether my grandparents’ lives qualified as rural, I don’t fixate on the number of people living in their Pennsylvania townships, about 600 in one and nearly 6,000 in another. Instead, I think about my Pop Pop, who worked second shift at the Chrysler plant so he could farm during the day. And my Mom Mom who took over some of his egg routes, delivering throughout southeastern PA and Delaware. And how they would later greet generations of locals who came to pick strawberries or pumpkins on their farm. I think about my grandmother on my mom’s side who marveled each morning at the deer in her front yard and the sun peeking through the mountains of north central Pennsylvania. And how she spent countless hours serving in her church and the volunteer fire company.

Often people may think of rural life as sparse or lacking something essential. But I’d challenge that. Rural folks have something people in more populated regions would envy.

For generations, rural communities have been coming together to solve problems: from industries or local economies collapsing to neighbors facing illness or poverty. In fact, few things will irritate rural folks more than telling them they need outside help — as a ride-share driver in a small New Hampshire town once reminded me: They’ve been doing just fine. 

That’s the thing, though. So many small towns and rural communities are finding and implementing innovative solutions, including in higher ed and job training. I want to be a part of telling those stories and connecting those people with each other. And as an engagement reporter, I want the people of these communities to be centered in this process. 

What I’ve learned most from my grandparents, and my incredible parents who have continued their legacies while raising triplets, is that the story of small towns in America is actually quite vast. And I’m truly looking forward to helping tell that span of stories through the lens of higher education.

This is why I need you! I want to hear what kinds of stories you want to see us cover at Open Campus. 

What should I be covering? Tell me here.

What I’ve been reading:

Proudly Made: A Story of Reinvention in the Big Woods and Small Towns of the Pennsylvania Wilds

If you want to read a story about the tenacity and beauty of rural communities coming together to lift up a region, this is your book. I’ve been so inspired by Tataboline Enos’ memoir, which tracks her life from Alaska reporter to founder of the PA Wilds nonprofit.

Here’s what the data center boom means for Wisconsin’s workforce

I feel like everywhere I look there’s a story about data center regulation or farmers resisting development, but Miranda Dunlap’s look at job growth for Wisconsin Watch and Open Campus was a fresh take I hadn’t seen yet.

What are you reading? Any recommendations for me? I’m excited to get started on April 15.

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education.

We've got exciting news! Emily Lytle will be joining Open Campus next month as our new reporter covering the role of college in rural America.

She'll be taking over Mile Markers and expanding the ways we connect with rural parts of the country. As our rural engagement reporter, she’ll do more than just write stories. She will also produce other forms of independent information to help people understand and shape the policies and institutions that matter most to their careers and futures. That could include services and products like guides, videos, and events.

She joins us on April 15 but before then, we want to hear from you. 

What's the most important thing to understand about rural America right now? What’s one suggestion you have for Open Campus to help better meet the information needs of rural regions? 

Reply to this email with your thoughts, or answer here.

Get to know Emily

After working as a community reporter in Delaware, covering stories that ranged from farmland preservation efforts to beach tourism trends, Emily most recently collaborated with news organizations around the globe as part of The Reynolds Journalism Institute’s innovation team. In this role, Emily produced the monthly Innovation in Focus newsletter and tested new tools, technology, and strategies alongside community-centered newsrooms.This looked like news-led walking tours in Oregon and a revival of personal ads for a Pittsburgh newspaper, among other experiments. 

Emily also co-leads the community journalism track for Radically Rural, which offers a platform and opportunities for rural leaders across the country to learn from one another.

She has received regional awards for her reporting on land use and health care access, and she earned a B.A. in Journalism at American University and a Nonprofit Management Graduate Certificate from the University of Missouri. 

She is often happiest when she is outdoors, whether that's paddling on a lake in Missouri or walking around her family's farm in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

What excites you about this beat? 

“Ever since I started journalism school in Washington, D.C., I wanted to tell stories about communities like the small town where I grew up. I loved reporting on people and places that challenged readers' first impressions and assumptions. I'm excited to meet people who represent the wide range of stories that exist in rural communities, and I can't wait to explore new ways to engage with folks about stories related to higher education and job training in places that often get overlooked.

I've had the privilege of living in a more rural area, reporting on small towns and farming communities, collaborating with rural newsrooms across the country, and working toward solutions as track leader for the Radically Rural Summit. And now I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to continue giving back to these communities in this new role.”

The Kewaunee Power Station stands decommissioned along Lake Michigan on Sept. 16, 2025, in Kewaunee, Wis. Cloverleaf Infrastructure approached property owners and town of Carlton officials to gauge their support for a data center near the former nuclear energy facility. The company is no longer pursuing the project, officials told Wisconsin Watch. Credit: Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch

What we’re reading

Our work with the Open Campus Local Reporter Network provides opportunities for us to dig into rural issues in communities across the country. Our 18 partner newsrooms have dedicated beat reporters in place to provide in-depth higher education reporting for their respective audiences — here are a few recent stories we’ve produced:

In Virginia, Allie Pitchon at Charlottesville Tomorrow wrote about the possible repercussions of a Trump administration decision to cancel a UVA research project. Farmers and experts say a rare chance to evaluate farm labor reforms may be lost.

Miranda Dunlap at Wisconsin Watch explored a small farming community’s decision to fend off offers from a data center to purchase farmland. 

“Once they take land away, you know, it’ll never come back,” Chris Kohnle, president of the local Tisch Mills Farm Center, told Wisconsin Watch.

Jason Gonzales at Chalkbeat Colorado wrote about a new initiative to help rural college students get an education that connects to the workforce, funded by more than $5 million in donations.

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support our work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: Medical training in Clinton, Indiana

Clinton, Indiana, home of the Little Italy Festival. (Courtesy Indiana University)

01: Postcards

Dr. Angela Hatfield's workday doesn't follow the neat boundaries of urban medicine.

At her health center in rural Clinton, Indiana, she might deliver a baby in the morning, round on hospital patients at lunch, and end her day checking on nursing home residents.

Between what are essentially four different employers — she also works as an adjunct professor at the University of Indiana — she's become the kind of comprehensive family doctor that rural communities desperately need.

"There's nothing that's not my job," as Hatfield puts it.

Her path to Clinton began at 18, when she enrolled in Indiana State University's Rural Health Program. From there, she moved straight into Indiana University’s Rural Medical Education Program in Terre Haute, completing all four years without ever rotating outside the region.

“I subspecialized in the Wabash Valley,” she likes to joke.

Such programs exist to keep doctors in rural communities that desperately need them, and in this case, it worked: Hatfield signed her first contract during her intern year and has been serving the same community ever since.

More than one-fifth of Hoosiers live in rural areas, according to the Indiana Business Research Center. That population is growing for the second year in a row, defying years of rural losses, yet rural areas have just 10.3 physicians per 10,000 residents, half the rate of urban areas.

Those numbers underscore the value of rural-focused exposure programs like the one Hatfield graduated from.

Medical residents who train in rural settings are much more likely to practice in similar environments, according to a report from the Indiana Rural Health Association.

The discrepancy is significant: Only 3-5% of urban-trained physicians ever move to rural practice, compared to 53% of those who spent most of their residency in rural areas.

Dr. Hatfield takes medical residents through her work in rural Clinton, Indiana. (Courtesy Indiana University)

Will they stay or will they go?

Today, Hatfield plays a major role in exposing the next generation of students to rural service — so much so that her office has become part hospital, part teaching laboratory.

Medical students shadow her often moving between her outpatient clinic, hospital rounds, and nursing home visits.

Her patients have grown so accustomed to seeing students that they ask where her trainee is during the rare weeks she works alone.

"Medicine in general is an apprenticeship," she explains. "The students just come and live my life with me for a month."

The immersive approach serves a dual purpose: Students get genuine exposure to rural practice's full scope, while Hatfield evaluates whether they can handle the independence and breadth required.

Some thrive; others find the responsibility intimidating, especially those already leaning toward mastering a subspecialty rather than doing the all-encompassing work a rural area often needs.

Hatfield has also noticed a major difference in the retention of those who come from a rural background already, compared to those who don’t.

The gap comes down to comfort level, Hatfield believes. Rural doctors must work with limited specialist backup, keeping patients local when possible to avoid overwhelming regional medical centers.

Real barriers, creative solutions

Transportation emerges as Clinton's most persistent healthcare barrier.

With no ride share drivers or public transit, patients depend on expensive taxis from one town over or group medical transport that can cancel with 15 minutes' notice if too few people need rides.

The hospital, local churches, and others have tried organizing shuttle services, but it was too cost-inefficient to employ drivers and they couldn’t find enough volunteer drivers to make it work.

Childcare presents another obstacle. Clinton has exactly one certified daycare, limited to children over three and requiring full enrollment rather than drop-in care.

For counseling appointments or lengthy visits, parents often can't arrange adequate supervision, forcing them to skip care or bring children who disrupt treatment.

These challenges require the kind of community-embedded problem-solving that defines rural medicine.

Union Hospital, Clinton's 25-bed critical access facility, typically houses 10-11 patients daily while managing everything from diabetic ketoacidosis to a "Swing Bed" program—short-term rehabilitation that helps patients avoid further-away nursing homes.

Telehealth has emerged as a crucial tool for overcoming some of her region’s geographic challenges.

With improved reimbursement making virtual visits financially viable, Hatfield can conduct follow-ups for medication adjustments and mental health care without requiring patients to navigate transportation challenges.

Teleconsultations with otherwise inaccessible specialists expand her treatment capabilities while keeping patients close to home.

“If we just need to follow up on a new medicine for headache or medicine for depression or something like that I don't need your physical body in front of me, then that telehealth visit can be super helpful,” Hatfield says.

The ripple effects

For Julie Wineinger, Hatfield's presence transformed her access to health care.

Before the doctor arrived, Wineinger faced hour-long drives to Rockville or extended waits at walk-in clinics.

When she fell ill without insurance, Hatfield not only provided hospital care but established an ongoing primary care relationship.

"When you're feeling sick, the last thing you want to do is get in the car and drive a long distance," Wineinger told IU News. "Dr. Hatfield was really a lifeline for us."

The economic impact extends beyond individual patient care.

Rural physicians create nursing jobs, support staff positions, and economic activity that helps sustain communities.

As Wineinger said: "The community dissipates when they don't have care."

Continuing the work

Indiana University School of Medicine's Rural Medical Education Program has produced 177 graduates since its creation, with most entering primary care fields and many remaining in rural Indiana counties.

The model emphasizes early clinical exposure, integrates rural relevance into basic science courses, and embeds residents in rural communities near Terre Haute.

For Hatfield, the work represents more than filling physician shortages.

It's about sustaining the kind of communities where neighbors know each other's children, where local festivals mark the seasons, and where comprehensive care comes from doctors who understand that healing happens within the fabric of community life.

"I chose to practice in a rural community because I want a deeper, multifaceted relationship with my patients," she says. "It helps me understand the stressors going on in their life, if they're not just a chart."

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support my work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: From beehives to climbing garages

01: Postcards

Blackburn College in southern Illinois has its particular charms. 

One of just 10 federally recognized “work colleges” — institutions that operate a mandatory student work program as a central part of their educational philosophy — about half its buildings were built by the students themselves over the years. 

That’s even more impressive when you consider that its population includes just a few hundred students … and about 600,000 bees, whose honey they help harvest.

“If we could all act as a hive, we would all be in a better place,” their president, Larry Lee, likes to say.

Those unique charms were recently showcased by the college in a “Mapping Belonging” project, using funding from the Endeavor Foundation to also renovate its counseling center and train a third of its faculty in Mental Health First Aid.

Their efforts are part of an $8.5 million effort to scale student well-being at 10 small liberal arts colleges across America, six of which are considered rural-serving institutions by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges.

For the last two years, those colleges have been sharing notes, testing ideas, and even forming partnerships to help improve wellness and mental health on campuses that often have little resources to support such services. 

“It’s transformed our delivery mechanism and enhanced our retention,” Lee says. “In thirty years in higher education, I’ve never benefited or learned more from such a shared collective.” 

At College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, students distributed hand-drawn maps that highlighted not just buildings but also hiking trails, meditation spots, and community coffee shops within five miles of campus.

Through the lab, the college also renovated a three-bay garage into a bouldering shed and had students work together to build a permanent campus sauna, in addition to adding resources like a 24/7 telehealth service and a peer coaching program. 

The Endeavor Lab Colleges include: Antioch College (Ohio), Bennington College (Vermont), Blackburn College (Illinois), College of the Atlantic (Maine), Prescott College (Arizona), Randolph College (Virginia), St. John's College (Maryland and New Mexico), Sterling College (Vermont), and Warren Wilson College (North Carolina). Northland College (Wisconsin) participated in Phase I but closed in 2025.

College of the Atlantic students hold a “map folding party” during orientation, meant to foster a deeper sense of belonging. (Courtesy Endeavor Lab Colleges)

Creative solutions to rural mental health gaps

The collaboration addresses a persistent problem in rural higher education: Most mental health and wellness programs are designed for large universities and don't scale down effectively to small, resource-constrained institutions.

"This is where collaboration, not competition, is serving us best," says Lori Collins-Hall, the project director of the Endeavor Lab Colleges program. "Not all models, especially those implemented and researched on larger campuses, are scalable to the constraints and staff of small higher education."

Such sharing isn’t so common among small liberal arts colleges that, despite spanning wide geographies, may feel like they’re competing for the same students — along with Blackburn College, Sterling College and Warren Wilson College are also federal work colleges.

[Read more: Nearly a year after Helene, a private college in western N.C. is still recovering]

These institutions are sharing intellectual property, successful programs, and even staff training across what would normally be competitive boundaries.

Some were doing so under trying circumstances: even as it faced closure this past spring, Northland College created a $2,500 mini-grant to support its students, faculty, and workers as they processed its final academic year.

As Lee notes, programs that support small rural colleges like the Endeavor Lab are rare, yet have an outsize impact on their local communities.

“It’s one thing to just try to recruit students to a rural community, but as a college, we are also the lifeblood of our region. If something happens to this college, our community would falter.” 

Working within the rural context

What emerges from these examples is a vision of rural liberal arts education that leverages what might traditionally be seen as limitations — small size, remote location, limited resources — as strengths for mental health support.

"Small liberal arts colleges cultivate relationships and foster community, buffering students from isolation and loneliness," the consortium notes in their materials. These campuses "emphasize a strong sense of belonging" and "nurture students' passion, balance, integrity, vision, and collective responsibility."

But the collaboration also recognizes the unique challenges of rural mental health support. Many of these communities lack adequate mental health services, and students often arrive at college without having had access to mental health resources in their home communities.

"A lot of this work recognizes the dearth of mental health supports and services in rural communities," Collins-Hall explains. The initiative emphasizes that "we're not going to counsel our way out of this" and instead focuses on building preventative skills and community-wide approaches to wellness.

The mapping project at the College of the Atlantic began with a question: How can the physical, cultural, and ecological geography of College of the Atlantic and Mount Desert Island be leveraged to support student wellness? (Courtesy)

Scaling the unscalable

Rurality has some shared traits, yet often feels very different based on geography, often making it difficult to scale such programs. 

Being able to draw insights from other disparate colleges, while still retaining a local touch, could be a solution. 

For instance, both College of the Atlantic and Sterling College developed mapping projects, but they look completely different. 

The former created ornate physical maps because of limitations around cell phone service on their campus, while the latter developed a sophisticated digital story map that incorporates geographic-information technology and years of ecological research.

Throughout the program’s first two years, the colleges share detailed implementation guides, budget breakdowns, and lessons learned through a collaborative knowledge base. 

When Blackburn College implements acceptance and commitment therapy training, other campuses can access their materials and adapt them. 

When Warren Wilson develops specific programming for Black male students, their approaches become available to the entire consortium.

Looking forward

As the Endeavor Lab Colleges enter phase two, the consortium plans to fully integrate all five initiatives — from curriculum work and mapping initiatives to nature and art-based wellness programs — across its remaining nine campuses.

Some early indicators are promising. Sterling College reported that 2025 graduates scored particularly high (4.1 out of 5) on measures of belonging. 

Blackburn has seen significant improvements in retention, while the College of the Atlantic's emergency fund for students facing financial hardship helped address some of the top reasons students leave college.

In a landscape where small colleges face mounting financial and enrollment pressures, the Endeavor Lab Colleges could offer a blueprint for how small institutions can leverage their collective strength to serve students better than any of them could manage alone.

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org. Support my work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: A Q&A with a Bates College professor who studies rural students and their college experiences

Bates College professor Mara Casey Tieken, author of “Educated Out.” (Courtesy Photo)

01: Postcards

Mara Casey Tieken began her career as a third-grade teacher in rural Tennessee, watching her students navigate small-town life with curiosity and intelligence. Years later, as a professor of eduction at Bates College, a private liberal arts school in Maine, she found herself wondering: Why weren't many of her former students attending schools like hers?

That question launched a multi-year research project following nine rural, first-generation college students as they navigated elite higher education. Her book "Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges—And What It Costs Them," was published by the University of Chicago Press earlier this year.

Tieken's research reveals how geography shapes college experiences in ways that go far beyond economics, creating barriers that push rural students away from their home communities while leaving them struggling to find their place in urban professional worlds. 

[Read more: In this shrinking Mississippi Delta county, getting a college degree means leaving home behind (via our partner Mississippi Today)]

I talked with her about how her findings challenge assumptions about college access and success, revealing the hidden costs of pursuing higher education far from home. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: What surprised you most during your research?

Tieken: For me, it was really interesting to try to think about how geography specifically shaped the students’ experiences. 

The students often individualized it, so when they faced a barrier or a challenge, they often thought it was because they hadn't studied enough for the math test, or they just, you know, they're the ones that are kind of weird, not fitting in. 

They didn't often see how this was maybe a larger structural issue.

And when they did, they often wrote it off as class. Geography does matter, clearly. Yet we often really don't think about that as part of the opportunity structure. If you look at professors' syllabi, it's pretty urban-centric. Or if you look at admissions officers, outreach approaches, it favors urban areas. If you look at career counseling services or career services, they're really designed to put kids in cities or put graduates in cities.

Q: How does geography matter differently from class?

Class and geography are very much related. If you think about the availability of jobs or, we know, for example, that on the whole rural folks have lower incomes than non-rural folks. So is that geography? Is that class? It can feel like a fool's errand to really figure out which of those is which, but there are some components that are very much about geography.

[Read more: How this rural Wisconsin community college raised grads’ wages — and saved its accreditation (via our partner Wisconsin Watch]

Still, if you look at the admissions process, especially at elite schools, most of the schools are small, they don't have a huge admissions staff. They go to the places that are easier to reach, where they can get high yields. And so what that means is they don't go to many rural places because they're really hard to get to. And so that's a lot of time and cost and then they might only yield maybe one student. It's just not cost effective from an admissions perspective.

We also know that quality of K-12 education really matters. Many rural schools don't even have a counselor. So of course it's really hard to give good post-secondary guidance if you're not there, if there's not a counselor or if you're being shared across several buildings. AP classes — we know that varies by geography. It's hard to have a robust AP bio class when you've only got one student that's interested.

Q: What are some examples from your research?

One story is Sylvan, who came in being really focused on wanting to be a doctor. He was always a smart kid. Everyone always said, “One day, you’ll be a doctor.” He's taking all the science classes, doing really well. Then he has this moment of crisis. He's taking Latin classes too, and loving Latin classes. And he's like, should I continue to go forward with the sciences? Should I do Latin?

He ends up kind of abandoning the pre-doctor track for a whole variety of reasons. One of them being that he didn't get into this fast track pre-med program. 

[Read more: ‘Easy to just write us off’: Rural students’ options shrink as colleges slash majors (in partnership with The Hechinger Report)]

But what I really didn't see at the time was all the ways in which there were structural barriers to him completing his pre-med requirements. For this fast track program, he needed to have job shadows, internships that all pay very little. He couldn't do that. He was going back home and bartending because that's where he could make the most money.

So this is a kid that was sort of pushed out of the STEM fields, not for lack of having the academic chops or even for lack of preparation. For him, it was all those hidden costs of academia that really kept him out.

Fast forward a few years. He does end up returning to the sciences arena, and is considering job options. He opts for the one in the city that seems prestigious over a promising one back home. 

I do my last interview with him the October after graduation, and he's in tears, He misses home. “Even if I am there though, what am I going to do?” he’s asking. There are so few jobs, fewer still if you want to be able to earn a master’s or a Ph.D.

Plus, now he's experiencing some disconnect with his family just because they've had very different past four years while he was at college. I talk about how the students are educated out, and he is, but they also have trouble being in these other places too. They're kind of stuck in between.

Q: What changes would help rural students succeed at selective institutions?

There are a whole bunch of things that can be done. In terms of the admissions pipeline, admissions offices often think about geography in really superficial ways. "Yep, we got our kid from Idaho.” Not in ways that would allow us to think about spatial marginality. Are we getting kids from the places that probably have the most barriers or hurdles to overcome?

When we've got more students from those places, they don't feel as isolated when they're on campus. Maybe part of merit is overcoming these various kinds of geographic barriers.

In terms of experience on campus, reducing all the hidden costs of college. Making sure that when you are offering internships, they're paid at a level that would actually be competitive with what students could earn in blue collar jobs back home. One student returned home because he could make more money digging trenches than any of the opportunities related to what he was studying. 

All the students came because they wanted connections. Very few of them actually got connections, because connections at these elite institutions are often going through things like “Your roommate invites you to Cabo, and so then you're hanging out on the yacht with your roommate and their parents.” These students aren't being invited to those kinds of things.

I think there's a lot to do in our curriculum. Students read urban authors, they study cities. They often see really flat, one dimensional portrayals of rural places. They read "Hillbilly Elegy." I think there's a lot of curriculum that we can do to make sure that the portrayals of rural places, first, they're there and they're authentic and they don't reinforce stereotypes and continue to alienate rural students.

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org, or check out our advertising information page. Support my work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: A young farmer’s recruitment

Kendall Rae Johnson, 10, recently did a tour of land-grant colleges while promoting urban farms and financial literacy as the USDA’s National Urban Agriculture Youth Ambassador. (Courtesy NUag Initiative)

01: Postcards

College football teams have occasionally made headlines for offering scholarships to students as early as middle school.

But what about a 10-year-old getting an offer from an agriculture program?

Kendall Rae Johnson, whose accomplishments include being the youngest USDA-certified farmer in the United States, recently wrapped up a national tour of historically Black land-grant universities.

At the end, she walked away with something most high school seniors dream of: a full-ride scholarship offer.

The Atlanta resident received the surprise offer from South Carolina State University President Alexander Conyers during her visit to the Orangeburg campus, the final stop on her five-university tour.

SC State University President Alexander Conyers, left, presents an Ag Innovation Scholarship offer to Kendall Rae Johnson and her parents, Ursula and Quentin Johnson.

"The best part of that trip was when they gave me the full ride scholarship," Kendall Rae told me. "It was just running through my mind at that point. Happiness, excitement, that someone believed in me enough to give me a full ride scholarship to college at the age of 10."

From Back Porch to Her Own Farm

Kendall Rae's farming journey began at age 3 with her great-grandmother Laura "Kate" Williams, who taught her to grow collard greens on their back porch.

By age 6, she had become Georgia's youngest certified farmer, and soon after, the youngest nationally.

Today, her farm — about an acre that originally belonged to her great-grandmother — produces everything from peaches and strawberries to beets and okra.

She's also developed her own products, including a marinara sauce and honey.

"I like helping the community out with fresh fruits and vegetables," she says. "I also like to travel and learn different farming techniques and how other people do it."

Her parents, Quentin and Ursula Johnson, have supported her agricultural passion despite having no farming background themselves.

"The last generation of farmers we had was maybe two generations ago," her father said. "We just said we'd support any idea our child had when we saw real active focus. She zeroed in on plants and wanting to grow things, so we just stuck behind it."

The University Tour Circuit

Kendall Rae's scholarship offer came at the end of touring land-grant HBCUs. The universities were established under the Second Morrill Act of 1890. (These universities are sometimes also known as 1890 institutions.)

The tour, organized in partnership with USDA's National Urban Agriculture Initiative and Virginia State University, took her to Virginia State, Tennessee State, Prairie View A&M, Southern University, and finally South Carolina State.

As USDA's National Urban Agriculture Youth Ambassador, Kendall Rae used the tour to promote agricultural education, financial literacy, and USDA youth loan programs.

"We came up with an idea: What if the teaching came from another kid?" her mother Ursula explains. The universities were eager to connect with young people interested in agriculture.

Each campus offered something different. At South Carolina State, Kendall Rae toured the university's 300-acre research farm in Olar, participated in a robotics workshop, and even got to drive a John Deere tractor.

"She got a chance to drive their million-dollar machine and learn how they check the weather," her mother recalls. "When you stand in their farm field, it's like a sand dune — it’s very different from what she has at home.”

Early Investment in Talent

The 1890 Agriculture Innovation Scholarship (currently valued at $83,500) covers full tuition, fees, and room and board at SC State. For Conyers, the offer represents an investment in exceptional potential.

"We were genuinely inspired by Kendall Rae's focus and maturity," Conyers said in a statement. "It's not every day you meet a 10-year-old who talks about microorganisms, crop counts and longhorn cattle. She's remarkable."

For Kendall Rae's parents, the scholarship offer provides both security and validation.

"It's almost like they're investing in her and in us," her mother says. "Telling us parents, “You don't have to worry about school, because there's an offer on the table, but we want that child to thrive in what it is they believe in."

It also reflects what might be a broader shift of academics taking a more aggressive approach to recruiting top talent, in ways more often seen on the football field or tech giants.

Just like a smaller football program may extend scholarship offers earlier in order to stand out and build a longer relationship with a student, universities may begin exercising similar strategies to standouts in other arenas.

"If you don't go back and encourage kids when they are younger, you might find it harder to attract them to your program," Ursula says.

Building the Pipeline

Kendall Rae’s tour reflected a broader strategy by the universities to cultivate interest in agriculture among young people.

These HBCUs have long served rural communities, but attracting the next generation of agricultural leaders requires reaching students early.

Though she's currently a homeschooled fourth-grader going into fifth grade, Kendall Rae told SC State that she already has big plans.

"How big is the farm I want? I want at least 100 acres. And I want a longhorn, baby.”

Whether or not she actually chooses SC State down the line, the scholarship offer represents something new in higher education: recognizing and investing in exceptional young talent, regardless of age.

"Kendall Rae is driven, focused and passionate about making a difference," President Conyers said. "She represents the type of leader South Carolina State is proud to invest in — and we'll be ready when she is."

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org, or check out our advertising information page. Support my work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: Balancing rural-urban needs

02: Roadside Attractions: New pathways emerge

Flagship university extension services, such as those at Ohio State University, have long served rural communities with agricultural support — but could they be doing more?

01: Postcards

Although higher ed itself is a political football, Americans are increasingly convinced that public universities should be balanced in serving both urban and rural needs.

That’s one key takeaway from a longitudinal study conducted by Ohio State University, which had nearly 400 respondents give their perspectives in 2021 and in 2025.

Four years ago, respondents were asked: ““In an ideal world, who should be prioritized by the public universities in your state: rural or urban communities?”

Back then, 70% of respondents answered that “there should be no difference between how rural and urban communities are prioritized.”

When those same participants were asked the question again this spring, 83% agreed, signaling a continued belief that universities should not favor rural or urban needs more than the other.

“This is true for the vast majority of people, regardless of where they live," says Stephen Gavazzi, director of the Center for Human Resource Research at Ohio State University, whose team conducted the survey.

It’s a particularly intriguing study, Gavazzi says, because the researchers asked the same people the same questions to see how their perceptions shifted.

Nearly all of the respondents who wanted a balanced approach still held that stance four years later — meaning that most of the shift came from people who previously felt universities should favor one geographic region over the other.

When the survey was conducted this spring, 11% of participants believed that rural communities should be prioritized, while 6% believed urban communities deserved higher priority.

To Gavazzi, the study underscores that universities aren’t structured to deliver the balance that the public wants.

“It’s so easy to look at the university structure and realize: We’re not set up for that,” he says.

How expanding extension services could help

Among public universities, many land-grant universities in particular have a secret weapon for rural engagement: extension programs that have connected campuses to farming communities since 1917.

Extension programs bring research-based knowledge and practical education to communities outside traditional academic settings, often allowing people to participate in lectures and workshops even if they’re not enrolled.

The problem? Most of these programs still live in colleges of agriculture, creating silos that Gravazzi has experienced often in his 34 years at Ohio State.

This isn't a new concern for Gavazzi.

In his 2018 book "Land Grant Universities for the Future," co-authored with West Virginia University President Gordon Gee, he called for universities to "get their acts together” and get away from this very old model of community outreach.”

Now he argues the data further validates his point. And the result is a significant missed opportunity.

“People who aren't in the College of Ag say “Isn’t that rural work being done through extensions, isn't that their job over in agriculture?" Gavazzi says.

And when extension programs only focus on agriculture, rural communities miss out on everything else the university offers — from business development to social work to engineering.

Meanwhile, faculty in other departments may focus solely on urban and suburban issues, because they assume extension has rural needs covered.

When extension services do venture into urban areas, Gavazzi notes, "Guess what they do? Urban agriculture."

It makes sense given their expertise, he says, but "why aren't they doing something on leadership development?"

A simple fix, with complicated politics

About 15 states have moved their extension services out of agriculture colleges and into offices of academic affairs. The impact?

"Outreach and engagement in rural and urban areas becomes more uniform across the university," Gavazzi says.

Switching would require universities admit their current structure doesn't match their mission, or what the public expects from them.

“There’s a conundrum here. The university, through extension services, has largely been able to meet rural communities where they need to be met. But the rest of the university isn’t coming with them. It’s just agriculture.”

That disconnect matters more now than ever, especially as rural needs have taken more of the limelight in recent election cycles.

“We’ve seen more understanding of the need to pay attention to rural issues, especially from a political standpoint,” Gavazzi says.

Yet many universities remain in organizational patterns from a century ago, when 80% of Americans worked in agriculture and lived in rural areas, compared to the 20% who do today.

That narrow ag-centered focus doesn’t reflect the current diversity of rural towns and their communities, which have become important hubs for innovation and entrepreneurship.

“What we’re failing to see is the university do what it needs to balance the ledger.”

02: Roadside Attractions

• UW hopes to expand rural pilot program. The pilot focused on outreach to 26 rural students across seven districts, according to the Badger Herald, giving them the opportunity to attend lectures and visit labs while exploring life at the University of Wisconsin.

• Kansas City adds Rural Health Scholars Program. The collaboration of eight community colleges across Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma creates a new pathway for rural students to become osteopathic physicians or dentists.

• Rural Georgia college works to address nursing shortage. This piece by WRBL takes a deeper look into a dynamic playing out across the country, as community colleges partner with local hospitals to address gaps in the health care workforce.

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org, or check out our advertising information page. Support my work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: The rural cost of Trump’s tax cuts

01: Postcards

Growing up in rural northeastern Arkansas, Chuck Welch came from a family of sharecroppers where his paternal grandfather couldn't read or write, and his other three grandparents had only eighth-grade educations "because once you got to the eighth grade, you worked the farm."

He went on to serve as president of the Arkansas State University System, as well as a number of roles touching on rural higher ed. Now Welch leads an organization that represents hundreds of public colleges and universities, including 136 rural-serving campuses, as president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).

His personal and career journey has given him unique insights into the challenges facing rural students and institutions today. And with federal policy changing and enrollment pressures mounting, Welch sees both threats and opportunities for rural higher education.

In this newsletter, we discuss how rural colleges are adapting to economic pressures, and why international students matter more to their bottom line than most people realize. (This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

Q: How does your background shape your perspective on rural higher education?

I have a unique interest in rural just having grown up in Arkansas and having worked with campuses that were in very rural parts of the state, and also knowing that in many cases, higher education is considered unattainable by some in rural areas or there's a cultural challenge and difference. Certainly that was the case in my family as I'm a first-generation college student.

One of the things that my dad said to me was that when a young male graduated in that rural area, at that time, they had three choices: work on the farm and pick cotton; move to St Louis, likely drive a truck; or move to Detroit and work on one of the factory lines.

But, you know, never in my life was there ever a question whether I was going to go to college. My parents were very, very, very supportive of it and pushed it. But they didn't have a great deal of knowledge about what that meant, or what's a grant, what's a loan, what's work study, any of those kinds of things.

Q: What are some of the challenges you’re seeing in rural higher education at AASCU?

What's on my mind right now is the impact that these campuses are going to feel as a result of some of the changes that are being either implemented or proposed. More specifically, obviously, student aid is one that we have a great deal of concern about, knowing that a good number of rural students also have financial needs. Could be first generation. About a third of our rural students are students of color.

The proposed changes to Pell, the proposed changes to unsubsidized student loans. I mean, there's a whole host of things that we are concerned about. Medicaid cuts are very concerning to us for two reasons. One is obviously the impact it would have on state budgets. And the second is that there are 3.4 million college students who receive Medicaid in the United States. Now, those obviously aren't all rural, but you have to assume there are going to be a number of rural students as well who are receiving Medicaid.

Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted before President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” was passed. While Pell grants remain mostly unscathed, changes to student loans and significant Medicaid cuts were included in the final bill.

A decade ago, the University of the Ozarks faced a dwindling enrollment, but recovered in part by redoubling its international recruitment efforts — in 2023, almost a third of its 873 students came from overseas, primarily the Bahamas and Central America, according to a Financial Times report. (Photo: Courtesy University of the Ozarks)

Q: How are rural colleges affected by a potential crackdown on visas for international students?

What really has been eye opening for me is the lack of understanding among most policymakers and the general public about the value of international students in keeping costs lower for domestic students or local students.

They don't realize that international students tend to pay full tuition. They're not getting scholarships. They tend to live in the residence halls. They tend to buy the meal plans. I mean, they are income generators for the institution that allows the institution to not have to place increased costs on the local or domestic students.

The University of Central Missouri has lost 1,000 international students in one year, for example. And, you know, it's tough. And so then what? Where do the colleges turn to cover costs, and what does that look like?

After immigration crackdown, international students in Texas self-censor to protect their education - Open Campus

Q: How are institutions addressing affordability challenges?

I think some of the strategies that campuses are looking at is rethinking our pricing strategy. For a while, there was the mindset of, “You get what you pay for: If it costs more, it must be better.” A lot of campuses artificially inflated their sticker price, and then turned around and discounted that through scholarships or grant programs, so students were never really paying that sticker price.

Now I think there's a rethink of that about transparency, of look, here's your actual cost. At many of our institutions, if a student is a Pell student, they could take that and, with state scholarships or programs, effectively pay for the tuition and fees. But I'm not sure how well that's communicated.

There are campuses that are looking at micro grants, because a lot of times it's small amounts that are keeping students from — I just can't close the gap here, or I can't do that. And so institutions are looking for ways to make that happen. They're looking at more needs-based scholarships, as opposed to merit-based scholarships.

Q: How do you address concerns about students who start college but don't finish?

The vast majority of reasons of why students leave college has nothing to do with the institution. It's not that we failed them or it wasn't a good experience, it's having to care for a family member. They're low income. I mean, there's a whole host of different issues that are there.

The data is there and shows the degree is worth it. The million dollars more that you make in a lifetime, if you get a college degree. Or the fact that you're half as likely to be unemployed, or you're far less likely to be incarcerated in your lifetime. A college graduate tends to live eight years, seven to eight years longer than a high school graduate. Less than 2% of people on public support programs like SNAP are college graduates.

But that data doesn't overcome the immediate challenges and needs that these individuals have.When they're already teetering, or it's already a burden for them to be able to be there. And obviously, four years seems like a long time, a lot of cash outlay. Then you've got all of these voices in the background saying, “Well, college isn't worth it anymore." There's not a return on investment. The value is not there. You're being indoctrinated.” It’s a dangerous mix.

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org, or check out our advertising information page. Support my work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: From advising to coaching

02: Roadside Attractions: Rural colleges at risk

01: Postcards

When a rural Oregon Tech student was struggling to get through their curriculum, they didn’t turn to a fellow classmate or to an academic advisor for help.

Instead, they turned to a coach, provided to them by the college through a partnership with the Oregon nonprofit InsideTrack.

“I am wanting to have my textbooks on audio file or audiobooks and be able to listen to it in my vehicle or when I'm at the gym. I have an hour commute each way to work and it's the perfect time to be able to listen to my textbooks,” they wrote, in an exchange Oregon Tech shared with Open Campus while withholding the student’s name to protect their privacy.

The college’s ‘Read&Write” program felt “a bit archaic, and a lot of the features don’t work.” The student was having to download textbooks chapter-by-chapter, but the files were so big that they couldn’t fit on their phones.

“Actually making the files is adding a minimum 20+ hours to my school work and I feel like that makes my disability accommodations unequitable.”

They are just one of Oregon Tech’s nearly 800 students studying fully online while also balancing jobs, family lives, and, sometimes, disabilities that make taking traditional classroom courses challenging.

Without the coaching program, their struggles might have remained invisible to university administrators until poor grades revealed the problem. Instead, the coach was able to alert staff and advocate for better accommodations.

For Ruth Claire Black, dean of online learning and global engagement at Oregon Tech, that exchange clearly demonstrated the value of the coaching program.

“The students are talking to our coaches about issues that clearly are not on our radar, but should have been,” Black said. “For us, that’s a huge win.”

Beyond Academic Advising

While located in the Portland exurbs, Oregon Tech serves a unique population, with many of its students first-generation college students, working adults, or transfer students.

Nearly one-third of the university’s 5,300 students take at least one class online, while 15% are full-time online students — and for those students in particular, coaching has served as a way to let them know what resources are available even when it isn’t so easy to find them.

“Online students don’t get the same type of orientation, they just don’t,” Black says. “They rarely will walk by, say, the office for disability services, and think, “oh, maybe I need an accommodation.’”

In the wake of the pandemic, college administrators across the country have thought deeply about how to better serve rural and online students more effectively.

Oregon Tech was no different. And as Black and others considered how to best serve the students who were struggling most, they realized that advisers weren’t the answer.

“We thought about hiring more academic advisors, but academic advisors are really much more likely to help determine what classes you need to take, and why. They're not really equipped to do this type of work,” Black said.

The data is “pretty grim” for students who see their college experience interrupted, Black said, noting that “your likelihood of persistence to graduation is pretty low, less than 20%.”

That’s especially true for the types of students that Black sees most in their online learning programs: Most are in their late thirties or even early forties, creating not just challenges with juggling work and school, but also family.

“Many had parents that needed attention and help. They are often caring for both an above and a below generation, while working full time.”

The coaching model differs significantly from traditional academic advising, according to Ruth Bauer from InsideTrack. While advisors focus on course registration and degree requirements, coaches take a broader view.

"Our coaching methodology is really all centered on building a relationship with a student and building trust with the student, and then really helping them to break down challenges and obstacles they face into an action plan," Bauer explained. "A coach is there to support them through that process and to be their accountability partner as well."

The approach resembles "a life coach or an executive coach, but applied to a student experience," she said.

‘At their limits’

Online students surveyed by the university consistently reported feeling disconnected from campus life—understandable for those who "never intend to come to campus even for one class" and miss out on the sports events, clubs, and study groups that build community for traditional students.

"A lot of people just felt like they were sort of at their limits," she said. "They were doing their best, but they weren't making the kind of progress that was making them happy or achieving the kind of academic excellence that they wanted."

Since the college began piloting InsideTrack in 2023, it has shown enough positive results for Oregon Tech to expand the coaching program.

In a pre-enrollment campaign targeting students who had stopped out, "well over 100 students returned," Black said, “way above our wildest dreams and expectations."

Earlier this month, the college announced it is now expanding InsideTrack’s coaching across Oregon Tech's four campuses, including working with freshmen through the Strong Start program and continued support for online students.

For Bauer, the success reflects something larger than just academic support.

Coaching helps students develop a clear understanding of "economic social mobility as the outcome of the educational journey," particularly important for rural and first-generation students who may lack guidance on how college can help improve outcomes for them and their families.

Looking Ahead

As Oregon Tech refines its approach, administrators are learning to better identify which students benefit most from coaching. The highest-performing students enthusiastically opted in during early pilots, while struggling students—who might benefit most—were harder to reach.

The goal is to transition from offering coaches to anyone who wants them to really connecting coaches with the students who both most need the support and show the most willingness to engage with it.

"Success in coaching is really a lot about matchmaking the right students with coaching at the right time," Black said.

02: Roadside Attractions

• Rural colleges ‘are in trouble.’ So writes Dana Stephenson, co-founder of the work-based learning firm Riipen, in a piece for University Business. Noting that colleges closed last year at a rate of nearly one per week, double the pace of 2023, he advocates for creating stronger workforce-education pipeline and leveraging town-gown relationships.

• Religious colleges are among the most at-risk. That was the takeaway from NPR, which highlighted the struggles of St. Ambros and Mount Mercy colleges, as they fight to remain open and serve the rural populations surrounding Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org, or check out our advertising information page. Support my work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.

Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: How farming is attracting unlikely students.

02: Roadside Attractions: A mixed story on rural transfers.

01: Postcards

John Pressell been incarcerated for half his life, with intermittent stints that began when he dropped out of high school in 11th grade.

"I used to always look at education like, “Oh, I don't need it," the 44-year-old says. As a teen, John felt like he was making plenty of money on the streets while living what he describes as “a criminal life.”

Two years ago, everything changed. After being released following a decade in state prison, John connected with Reform Merced, a California nonprofit that helps formerly incarcerated individuals rebuild their lives.

They placed him at their recently opened organic farm, where he now tends bell peppers, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and seasonal crops.

"I enjoy working out around the field, I enjoy driving the tractor and I enjoy planting food," John says. "It's something that can actually stay with me in the future. Something to be proud of, where I can see people go to a grocery store, and think, ‘look, I grew that.’"

An Unexpected Student

Merced College is one of six community colleges that have received $42 million in state and federal grants to create free competency-based programs for agricultural technologies across California’s Central Valley.

"When we first thought about this program, it was designed traditionally for the more traditional farm laborer and upscaling them for the workforce," says Cody Jacobson, Merced’s director of ag innovation.

However, John represents somebody program leaders didn't initially anticipate.

He's one of a dozen or so formerly incarcerated students from Restore Merced who've enrolled in the AgTEC program, which allows students to work at their own pace through 14 skill areas, from digital literacy to equipment operation.

The partnership emerged when Restore Merced's director reached out to explore educational opportunities for their workers, and it’s flourished since.

"It turns out that what they're doing with Restore Merced is a great fit for what we're doing. And these individuals who are trying to get their lives back on track, they're eager to learn."

Starting from Zero

For John, the program began with a fundamental challenge: he had little experience using computers.

He wasn’t alone.

"In that first cohort of 14 students, probably 10 or 12 of them had never even touched a computer before," recalls instructor Karl Montague. "We were having to tell them how to turn the computer on. We were having to tell them, this is what we call a mouse."

That reality forced Merced to rethink its approach. While the program provided funding for computers, the instructors quickly realized that digital literacy was the foundational skill for the mostly online-based, self-paced course.

After all, if students couldn’t handle the basics of using a computer, how could they hope to learn through the program’s digital platform?

Instead of group orientations, support coordinator Nang Thao now onboards students individually, personally making sure they fully understand how to access their online modules.

“It was like herding cats because every single person had no idea what they were doing,” Jacobson said. “So that’s when we said time out, our onboarding process is going to change tremendously, and be much more 1-on-1 based.”

Beyond the Original Vision

It’s a far cry from how instructors envisioned the program. The curriculum was initially bold, futuristic, ambitious.

The marketing promised a new kind of farm worker, capable of operating drones, sensors, and tech-heavy tractors.

“A lot of our faculty thought that industry wanted workers to fill specific needs. That they needed a student who could diagnose the ins and outs of a specific type of electric controller, for example,” Jacobson says.

But when Jacobson and his team reached out to employers, the request was very different.

“Instead, it was like: “We just need to make sure that if something is broken, the employees can turn the equipment off safely. That they know how to communicate with a foreman, how to formulate an email, and operate basic technology.”

In addition to teaching students how to navigate the online course platform, the digital literacy component covers those basics.

And while the course is self-paced, Thao is checking their online progress on a biweekly basis, and personally texts students reminders to keep them on track.

“I would forget, but she was always texting me, and it helped,” John says.

John Pressell (left) and his Merced AgTEC instructor Karl Montague. Photo: Nick Fouriezos

Flexibility by Design

The program's competency-based structure allows John to balance coursework with his full-time farm job with Restore Merced, as well as his family responsibilities (he has four children and a granddaughter in the Merced area).

"Sometimes when I get off of work, I'm tired where I don't even want to like open up the computer," John admits. "But I have to... Some days are harder than others, but I'm going to keep with it."

Of the 60 students in the program’s first year at Merced, less than half are active or retired farm workers. Thao thinks that part of the challenge is convincing them they have time to complete the program while still working.

"A lot of our students, they do work, right? So for them, it’s about explaining that they can put in early hours on, say, a Saturday morning, before they go out to their work day,” Thao says.

She reminds them of the flexibility of the online program, and it’s self-paced nature. Open office hours and assessments with the instructor are available between 2 to 6 pm Monday through Thursday, which allows active farm workers to come after their morning shifts.

"We remain flexible with them,” says instructor Karl Montague, who is willing to make times work to fit his students’ schedules.

Looking Forward

At Restore Merced, John has already proven himself as a dedicated worker, earning a full-time job and overtime pay. The certificate he's working toward at Merced College, typically completed within six months to two years, could open even more new doors.

"I hope to have people recognize this accomplishment and my competencies, to where they move me up, so that I can be the one working as a supervisor, checking on equipment, that sort of thing.”

Montague is seeing John’s progress match his ambition. "He's learning skills that he can now apply back to that farm. We love having students that want to learn, want to better themselves."

"I never thought I would see myself doing this," John reflects. "But I like doing it. I love doing it, actually."

02: Roadside Attractions

• Rural health care education gets a boost in Tennessee. Grants of up to $2 million have been awarded to 20 higher ed institutions across the state, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission announced this week.

• Rural hospital reopening. A $150 million state investment will go towards reopening a rural hospital in North Carolina’s Martin County, reports Brianna Atkinson, our higher-ed reporter at partner WUNC. The University of North Carolina system had previously approved funds to go toward the hospital’s reopening, in the hopes of addressing a health care desert.

• Rural transfers see mixed progress. For Inside Higher Ed, Gerardo de los Santos argues that lawmakers should recognize rurality as a key lens for evaluating transfer outcomes.

  • He cites a complicated picture, in which rural community colleges experienced a 12% increase in transfers to 4-year institutions in 2023, while other reports show low-income learners from Texas to California are seeing some of the lowest transfer rates in the country.

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email sales@opencampusmedia.org, or check out our advertising information page. Support my work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.