Studies: Rural students less likely to attend top colleges but less hindered by family adversity

Highly qualified students from rural areas are less likely to enroll at the highest ranked U.S. universities and colleges than their urban and suburban counterparts, says a new study from Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education. Matthew A. Holsapple and Julie Posselt, doctoral students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and research assistants at the center, will present their findings Sunday at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, Peter Schmidt of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

The study used data from the National Center for Education Statistics' 2002 Educational Longitudinal Survey and examined students' enrollment at U.S. News & World Report's 2004 list of top 50 universities and top 50 liberal-arts colleges. "We find that even holding constant academic achievement and expectations, socioeconomic traits, and financial-aid factors, rural students are as much as 2.5 times less likely to enroll in one of the U.S. News-top-ranked institutions compared to non-ranked four-year institutions," a summary of their findings says. The researchers made no allowance for geographic proximity of the students to the schools.

Two other studies scheduled to be presented at the conference offer better news for rural students, Schmidt reports. Both studies, supported by the National Research Center on Rural Education Support at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, used data from the Educational Longitudinal Survey that tracked eighth graders in 1988 over time. In one study, "Researchers concluded that the relatively low postsecondary-enrollment and degree-attainment rates of rural students are not a result of their geographic location, in itself, but stem from their greater likelihood than students elsewhere of coming from socioeconomic or demographic backgrounds associated with educational disadvantage," Schmidt writes.

The second study revealed "rural students raised in nontraditional families, such as those headed by single parents, were no less likely than their rural counterparts from traditional families to earn a bachelor's degree," Schmidt writes. Conversely, urban and suburban students from nontraditional families were significantly less likely to earn a bachelor's degree than those raised in traditional families. (Read more)