How The STARS College Network Will Help California’s Rural Students

Though 20% of public school students in the United States live in rural areas, many college campuses either don’t track their populations of rural students or find the number to be low. The Small Town and Rural Students College Network is hoping to change that by improving access to information about college for rural students around the country, including in California.

The University of Southern California and Caltech are among 16 schools that have recently opted into the new program. At USC, rural and small-town students have represented just over 2% of the freshman class in recent years; at Caltech, 7% of the admitted 2027 class attended rural and small-town high schools.

The STARS College Network uses a combination of the National Center for Education Statistics locale data and federal Rural-Urban Continuum Codes to identify and define “rural” and “small town.”

STARS was born at the University of Chicago. Executive Director Marjorie Betley said the idea started with Byron Trott, a trustee of the University of Chicago, who noticed the lack of rural students on campus after visiting his own rural Missouri hometown. When the university began tracking its rural and small-town student population, it found the number to be between 2% and 3%.

Over the last five years, the University of Chicago has been able to increase that number to 9% through a program for emerging rural leaders, which allows rural high school freshmen and juniors to spend a week on campus, attending lectures, participating in hands-on activities and tours and receiving guidance from admissions counselors and college application workshops.

Into and through college

The goal of STARS is to assist students not only with getting into college, but also with getting through college, which can be more difficult for rural and small-town students. A 2019 study by researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst found that students in rural areas still had lower average rates of college enrollment and degree completion when compared to nonrural students.

Betley said that the hope for STARS, supported by a $20 million gift from Trott Family Philanthropies, is to scale all the program offers for the entire country, starting with a pilot comprising 16 schools, chosen for their interest in increasing rural enrollment in recent years. Along with USC and Caltech, other participating colleges include Ivy League schools like Columbia University and Yale University, as well as smaller universities like Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

“Rural and small-town students are a group of students that we’ve been talking about in the admission profession for many years, as being a group that is really underrepresented, especially at institutions in urban areas,” said Tim Brunold, USC dean of admissions.

“It’s not just enough to get them to college,” Betley said. “But we want to make sure that we support students all the way through as well.”

How STARS works

To help students with applying and being accepted to college, STARS provides summer programs similar to the emerging rural leaders at the University of Chicago to give rural students a taste of what college is like, since many of them don’t grow up near universities. STARS also hosts workshops on applying for college, writing the essay and the financial aid process.

When rural students get to college, Betley said, it is important to build relationships. At the University of Chicago, she is an informal social adviser for rural students, some of whom she’s known since their first year of high school. Students also receive additional financial support through STARS, including scholarships and a fully funded summer internship of their choice, to fill gaps between them and students from suburban or urban areas who sometimes receive such experiences in high school.

STARS also partners with Khan Academy and Schoolhouse, two leading online educational services, to fill academic gaps, particularly in math. A new study from the RAND Corp. found that small and rural high schools and schools that mostly serve students from historically marginalized communities offer fewer opportunities for students to take advanced math. This means rural students are often behind nonrural students in this subject area when they arrive at college.

Support for STEM

This resource could be especially valuable for colleges like Caltech, which focus on science, technology, engineering and math.

“We look for the best and brightest STEM minds in the world, and we recognize that students do not all have the same opportunities to showcase their passion for STEM,” Ashley Pallie, Caltech’s director of undergraduate admissions, said in a news release. “We need to ensure that these students know that they matter to us and our admissions process, and also that they know their talents are welcome at Caltech.”

STARS is also making connections with businesses in rural areas to create pathways for students who want to return to their hometowns after college. Betley said this can help prevent rural “brain drain.”

“What we don’t want is for these 16 institutions to try to swoop into rural America and take their best and brightest and just never see them again,” Betley said. “It’s about building relationships. It’s about community buy-in.”

The schools work together to provide resources to rural and small-town students, but Betley said the idea is also for the colleges to work within their own constituencies. Brunold said USC hopes to assist rural students all over the country, but because most students attend college closer to home, it’s likely they’ll mostly be helping students in California and on the West Coast.

“We believe that if we can get people with different backgrounds, living, studying, working together, becoming friends, that that’s going to benefit everyone that’s involved,” Brunold said.

The hope, according to Betley, is that if this pilot is successful, the program can be adapted and applied to any school, creating a network of hundreds of colleges.

“We want them [rural students] to feel welcome, prepared and wanted on our campus, because we really do — we really want their voices and their perspectives, and they’re important to have,” Betley said. “We can’t call ourselves representatives of the United States in terms of our classrooms if we’re missing out on 20% of students in there.”