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Rural Colleges Have Unique Challenges and Opportunities
Carrie Besnette Hauser, President and CEO
Colorado Mountain College
0:53
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I like to say about rural institutions that we really can innovate in ways that I think some of our suburban and urban partners can’t because we’re ”it” in a lot of cases. There isn’t sort of the noise and the clutter of other institutions in our backyard. And so if we want to innovate and get something done, we’re the ones to reach out and actually get it done.
And so I like to think that we’re the head of the fish versus the tail of the fish. And we can try things, we can incubate. We have very close relationships with our school district partners, our workforce partners, nonprofit partners in these local communities because we’re so intimately involved on a day-to-day basis. And sort of the clutter of being in a big urban area with a lot of noise just doesn’t exist.
Greg Hodges, President
Patrick & Henry Community College
1:16
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The history of rural America in the last 40 years has been discouraging and, in many cases, challenging. Ours is a great example, frankly, of that phenomenon. In the latter part of the 20th century, my community was the sweatshirt capital of the world. More sweatshirts were made in our community than anywhere in the world. Furniture capital of America in many ways as well. The latter half of the 20th century, first part of the 21st century, with offshoring, we became the unemployment capital of Virginia and then, unfortunately, the opioid capital of America.
So now we’re seeing that turnaround, frankly. That’s a story that’s been repeated in far too many rural communities across America. Now we’re seeing jobs returning back to our community, international companies coming to America instead of us sending them overseas, and a real opportunity to reinvigorate our rural communities.
Geographically, rural America makes up more than 80 percent of the country. So we’ve got to make sure that our rural communities thrive. If the economic engine of America is going to be strong, it will only be as strong as the economies of our rural communities. So for Patrick & Henry, this pathways work is not just about enrollment for us by any means. It’s about the vitality of the rural community that we serve.
Octavia Lawrence, Interim VP of Student Services
Western Kentucky Community and Technical College
1:11
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It is important, especially in rural community colleges, to make sure that we are creating that college-going theme because a lot of times we are serving students who may be first-generation students who have not necessarily had the tradition of going on to higher education.
And so it’s important to create that college-going awareness for those students. And so it really starts from K through 12 and then leads on to additional partnerships once they get into higher education. But it’s important to make sure that we are creating that culture for our region so that students understand the benefits of being at a rural community college, they understand the benefit of higher education, and they are truly not, it’s not something that is not familiar to them. And so I think it’s really important for us to work to make sure we’re creating that college-going culture.
Christy Ponce, President
Temple College
0:47
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In a rural setting, you have many possible challenges: transportation, technology, bandwidth, access to credentialed faculty in the local area. You’re also dealing with lots of other challenges that impact families’ everyday lives, like systemic poverty. And so because of it, we all have a sense of urgency to help provide training, provide credentials of value that are going to lead to high-paying jobs.
So that way, we can make sure that students are able to get access to higher-paying jobs, that they’re able to elevate out of poverty, that they’re able to break the cycle of poverty for not only them, but their families and generations to come.
Jona Rinard, Dean, Transfer and Public Services
Washington State Community College
0:48
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Some of the challenges that we face are accessibility. So how do we encourage individuals, especially adults, that they have the ability to come back to college, to upskill, take courses, to then get them into a higher paying job. But just helping them recognize that there is an accessible opportunity at our college for them. And it isn’t always about us creating something that works for the college, but instead knowing our population and creating opportunities based on their needs, not our needs. And so we need to understand and know our population, and that is critically important in a rural area.
Patty Scott, President
Southwestern Oregon Community College
0:53
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Coos Bay is very rural. We’re 120 miles from the nearest four-year school and the same distance from Costco. So my community is a non-college-going culture. And generations of people who, in their mind, did just fine not going to college. And I believe that when they say college, they mean a four-year degree.
And we’re in a time now where people need something. They don’t necessarily need a four-year degree, but they need some kind of postsecondary training, whether that’s the military, apprenticeship, the trades, or community college. That’s one of the challenging aspects of this work in a rural environment.
Rural Colleges Are Interconnected With Rural Economies
Adrienne Forgette, Vice President for Learning
San Juan College
0:38
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I think one of the reasons why this initiative is so important is that rural communities are threatened in a lot of ways. That they’re small, finding ways for the community to stay together and to have economic viability is challenging.
Community colleges are often at the center of that economic development and economic diversification. Communities look to their community colleges for help in those things, and community colleges are uniquely positioned to deliver on that.
Davis Jenkins, Senior Research Scholar, Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University
1:11
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Rural communities, if they’re going to thrive, are going to have to grow their own talent. But if they’re going to grow their own teaching force, their own nurses and health care workers to work in rural hospitals, their own advanced manufacturing workers for the growing numbers of manufacturing that is in rural areas, support people working at a distance telecommuting, they’re going to have to grow their own. And community colleges are the nexus of where this learning is going to happen, helping take people from schools and get them on a career path, but also people who are working especially in low-wage jobs.
There are no public universities in truly rural areas. They’re rural-serving universities, but community colleges are the front line of talent building and growing your own workforce for their communities, which is what their communities are going to survive or not on.
Erica Orians, Vice President and Executive Director
Michigan Community College Association Center for Student Success
1:11
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I think two things in the rural context. Number one, rural community colleges are really part of rural economic development. They have an important role in engaging with employers, not only to supply employees or to supply talent, but also to attract industry, business, and to attract the future of work to their local communities. That’s number one.
Number two, in all the rural community colleges that I work with, they are the cultural hub of their communities. And the opportunity that they have to use the guided pathways framework to maximize that cultural center of their community is very valuable. Not only do they often bring cultural arts to the community, I work with a college that has an indoor swimming pool, and every kid in the community learns how to swim at the community college. So they offer so much beyond what we see as simply preparing a talented workforce.
Tracy Skopek, Vice President of Instruction and Chief Academic Officer
Kilgore College
1:15
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In the rural context, you’re going to find that a lot of us are seeing our young people leave our communities. They’re leaving the area, and that creates less tax base, that creates less educational opportunities because school systems don’t have money to continue to be cutting edge. And so being able to provide those skills through transfer education or through workforce education will help create, or continue to have, those vibrant communities where people want to stay and have those jobs, whether they want to work for an industry that’s already there or be entrepreneurial in their own community.
It also allows us to be cutting edge in some of those things. In the post-pandemic world, you may not necessarily be site bound when you’re doing your own work. And East Texas is a great place to live. It’s cost effective to live out there. It’s not expensive in housing. And why not? If we can provide those skills and certifications, we can also attract people into the area and, again, grow that tax base, grow our economy. And so you don’t see that outpouring of people to the big city.
Rural Students Are Deeply Connected to Place
Leah Barrett, President
Northeast Community College
1:15
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What we’ve learned in the past three years in Nebraska is our community foundation for the state has done some surveying of young people, high school students specifically. And what we’re learning is that we are on a trajectory for our young people to want to stay in the state and to want to stay in their rural communities. And so when we talk about this rural guided pathways work, it’s recognizing that our students are choosing to be place bound. They want to stay where they live. They want to be able to access opportunities for education and bring them back to their communities. This is also true for how automation is occurring in agriculture and in manufacturing.
People want to stay in their jobs, but they need upskilling opportunities as these industries rely more on robotics and technology. And so when we talk about that rural guided pathways work, we are talking about those students and those learners that really are looking for an opportunity to stay in their communities and to create rural vitality in our state and in our region.
Adrienne Forgette, Vice President for Learning
San Juan College
0:44
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In my community, 40 percent of our students are Native Americans. They are citizens of a sovereign nation incorporated within our county. They do not want to live somewhere else, or most of them do not want to live somewhere else. They want to be at the place that they call home.
Having a viable way to do that, to keep people on their sacred ancestral lands in a way that is sustainable, life-sustaining, soul-sustaining. That’s really important, and that’s part of what the mission of the college is.
Jill Loveless, Provost
Western Virginia Northern Community College
0:38
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Focusing on a local and regional approach for rural community colleges is extremely important because we know that many of our students want to stay and live and work locally. Many students have families, and their families go back generations.
It’s important that they serve their community. And I think even our students who transfer as part of a guided pathway, they want to come back to their community and benefit the community as well. So I think that’s why that regional and local approach is very important to the success of this project.
Brian Shonk, Chancellor
University of Arkansas Community College-Batesville
0:40
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Our students need to work to support their families. There’s that balance between work, life, and school. Oftentimes, the work life takes over to help with the family life. It’s very generational. You’ll see several generations living under one roof, all working together to help pay the bills, taking care of younger siblings, taking care of grandparents.
It’s very important that the time the student spends with us is very intentional. And then we do it the best we can so they can complete as quickly as possible and get to their next goal.
Community Partners Are Essential for Student Success and Regional Vitality
Leah Barrett, President
Northeast Community College
0:47
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When we talk about guided pathways work in the rural context, it is about our community, it’s not just about our college and our learners. Because we know that when we partner with our industry professionals, with our elected officials, we are focused on economic vitality and rural vitality.
And so working together to the same end to build the completion, retention, and creating pathways to credentials that provide a living wage does nothing but make our rural community strong. We do that together. We cannot do it alone as a community college. We need those partners to work with us.
Greg Hodges, President
Patrick & Henry Community College
0:50
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In a rural area, like ours, the institution is the only higher ed provider. We have no other public four-year or private four-year in our service region. So connecting students to economic mobility is our singular goal. So one of the challenges becomes aligning our community partners with us on this work, helping us to help them understand that what they provide for us is in fact helping students on a pathway toward a good paying job with family-sustaining wages.
So I wouldn’t call it a challenge as much as it is a real opportunity for us to take what we know is working, bring more partners on board because we candidly can’t do this work without those community partners. They become the essential element that allows us to really fulfill our mission of getting students connected to a good paying job with that family-sustaining wage.
Ryan McCall, President
Marion Technical College
0:38
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We want to be the first place that a business, a school, an individual, a local government, when they have a question, they have a concern, they have something that has to do with workforce or economic development, we’re the group that they call first to say, “Hey, can you help us with?” And maybe we don’t have the resources to help them, but we can connect them to somebody else that we do have a connection with.
And that’s why it’s so important to do this as a region because the expertise is spread across a lot of different areas, and we have to continue to come together to use those wisely and move the region and the community forward.
Kristen Miller, Vice President of Academic Affairs
White Mountains Community College
0:23
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Talking common language with our K–12 partners. K–12 talks about pathways all the time. We talk about pathways all the time, but are we engaging in the same types of conversations so that students have the measures in place to be successful from kindergarten through higher ed into career.
Kirstin Yeado, Senior Program Officer
Ascendium Education Group, Inc.
0:55
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I think the stakes are particularly high in rural communities where we know that there are unique challenges that learners are experiencing, like access to broadband or access to transportation services, or even just understanding from the moment they step foot on campus what their employment opportunities are as soon as they earn that degree or credential.
So those relationships with employers and community-based organizations, which may be lacking in some rural communities, there may not be a number of community organizations. So developing relationships with the organizations that you do have, really creating those strong collaborations with partners to make sure students receive the holistic supports that they need throughout their postsecondary experience is really, really critical in every community, but especially in rural places.
Guided Pathways Ensures Structure and Support for All Students
Denise King, Provost/Chief Academic Officer
Big Sandy Community and Technical College
0:21
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If a student’s going to make the effort to do what’s necessary to engage, we need to have all the other barriers removed. We can’t change our geography. I can’t bring you better internet, but I can at least make sure that your academic program is going to work well for you.
Charles Lloyd, President
White Mountains Community College
0:28
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In rural communities, at least for Northern New Hampshire, we’ve always done more with less. People have had to come together and work closely together. And I think guided pathways really is an excuse for people to come together and rally around something.
So if I were to say there’s a challenge, it might’ve been the pandemic, but now people can come together, have these conversations, and really look out for students, workforce, their families. This is about economic mobility and social mobilities.
Brian Shonk, Chancellor
University of Arkansas Community College-Batesville
1:03
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It’s all about the success of the community and improving the quality of life in the community and the region. We can’t do that alone. We need the employers. We need the chambers of commerce. We need our mayors. We need our county judges. We need everybody working on the same page. Rural guided pathways provides the playbook for everybody to operate out of and work toward that common goal of just a better life for everybody in our community.
Another benefit of the rural guided pathways is everybody operating in the same playbook leads to economic development for our area. Rural communities, you see many of them just fading off because they’re losing jobs, they’re losing people, they’re losing their tax base. The schools that adopt the rural guided pathways framework are definitely going to have a competitive advantage over those that don’t. And the communities are going to have a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
Vicky Wood, President
Washington State Community College
0:38
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The guided pathways framework is a proven model that advances student success. But it really helped me as a president go in and set a vision for where did this institution need to be in advancing student success.
So in addition to helping change the lives of our students, it really helped me as a president set a vision to inspire my team, to believe in that vision, to pull us all together, have one direction.
Josh Wyner, Founder and Executive Director, College Excellence Program, The Aspen Institute
1:07
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Guided pathways has, I think for six or seven years, really helped colleges envision reforms that encompass multiple parts of the institution. For too often, students were experiencing their course choices, their programs of study, the advising systems they got, the financial aid systems as disconnected, frankly, as individual things they experienced. And what guided pathways enables colleges to do is to start to think holistically about the student experience, to connect their education and their advising together, to try to create efficient and effective pathways to degrees of value.
So I think the guided pathways structure, from getting students connected all the way through to graduation, is a nice reform structure because it enables colleges to envision student services and student academics as connected and therefore deliver a much more efficient and effective educational experience.
Guided Pathways Centers Colleges on the Student Experience
Denise King, Provost/Chief Academic Officer
Big Sandy Community and Technical College
1:24
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I have found that the guided pathways model gives us a framework for organizing almost every single thing that we do. And in fact, the more that you dig into what this model is supposed to do — focus on the student journey from first contact all the way to beyond out the door to their job or to their transfer institution — every single person at the college is engaged in that.
And that is something that gives each member of the college community a sense of purpose and a sense of meaning connected to the student experience. When we focus on the student experience, then we can start letting go of some of the rivalry that takes place over resources at institutions.
Now my institution right now, we are resource poor. We have had declining enrollment. We’ve had challenges with our revenue. And during this time when everything is going up, up, up in price, it’s hard to function. And so by coming around using this guided pathways process allows us to come together to focus on what’s most important and to make the necessary sacrifices to get there and investments to get there as well. So it’s a really critical process for us.
Octavia Lawrence, Interim VP of Student Services
Western Kentucky Community and Technical College
0:54
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The guided pathways framework really gives us an opportunity to look at things from the student perspective and how we can focus on our students and look at our policies, our procedures, and create pathways that provide that economic mobility for our students as well as look at things that we have traditionally done that may not be the most equitable and how we might be able to structure our policies, procedures, our services in order to make sure that we are absolutely serving our students, providing them with clear paths to their credential, and making sure that we’re creating pathways that are flexible and adaptable for our student experience.
Kenneth Lawson, Vice President for Instruction
Skagit Valley College
0:54
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Part of what guided pathways does is it really helps us focus on what it is we’re trying to do for students. And ultimately what we’re trying to do for students is increase their social and economic mobility. And the guided pathways framework just really helps us focus on that.
We use the phrase a lot to “start with the end in mind,” and the end in mind is making sure students get good jobs or have a pathway where they can improve the quality of their lives. So having that kind of clarity is part of why the guided pathways framework is pretty important.
And I might add on one other thing too, is that the guided pathways framework itself is a comprehensive framework. Certainly that’s the way I like to treat it, where we’re really trying to change the whole culture of the college and do not just little one-off programs, but really change the way that we treat our students, support our students, and help our students get through what can be kind of bureaucratic systems.
Daniel Mosser, President
West Virginia Northern Community College
0:55
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The pathways are a way of organizing the work that we’ve done for decades in community colleges. That work has grown over the years to represent many various degrees, programs, credentials within the college, and it’s become a bit of a confusing hodgepodge of programs and choices for students.
The majority of our students are first generation, which means there was no one in their immediate family that went to college. So they’re navigating their way through college for the first time without a lot of family supports, trying to figure out which career fields and which degree programs are the best choices for them. And the pathways provide a way of helping the student focus in on the program areas that are the best choices for them, given their skill set, their interests, and so forth.
Erica Orians, Vice President and Executive Director
Michigan Community College Association Center for Student Success
0:18
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I think guided pathways can be valuable as a framework to listen to the student voice and listen to what their needs are and then be able to adapt the college to meet the student experience.
Laura Rittner, Executive Director
Ohio Association of Community Colleges Student Success Center
0:36
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I think the guided pathways framework is really important for colleges because it gives them a framework where everyone can see a role for themselves, whether they’re a faculty member or a staff member who supports students or an administrative leader.
I think it makes student success much more specific and practical by breaking it down into the practices within each pillar that we know from decades of work and research across the country, things that work to improve student success outcomes.