Giving Compass' Take:

• Aaron Gettinger reports that college recruiters often skip rural students in favor of more highly-concentrated urban and suburban students. 

• How can funders help colleges overcome the financial and logistical difficulties associated with recruiting rural students? 

• Learn about colleges working to attract rural students. 

The sunrise in rural central Michigan reveals a landscape of neatly divided cornfields crossed by ditches and wooded creeks.

But few of the sleepy teenagers on the lumbering school bus from Maple Valley Junior–Senior High School likely noticed this scene on their hour drive to Grand Rapids along the two-lane Highway 66 and Interstate 96.

They were headed from the two villages that make up their tiny school district  — Nashville and Vermontville, total combined population 2,404 — to the DeVos Place Convention Center, where 151 colleges and universities had booths set up at a recruiting fair organized by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC.

The students were going to see the recruiters because few recruiters come to see them.

Urban and suburban students may take college recruiting visits for granted, but recruiters rarely go to schools as small or as distant as Maple Valley, which serves fewer than 500 sixth- through 12th-graders.

“When we think about an urban high school, a college recruiter can hit 1,500 students at a time,” said Andrew Koricich, an assistant professor of education at Appalachian State University. “To do that in a rural area, you may have to go to 10 high schools.”

Read the full article about recruiting rural students by Aaron Gettinger at The Hechinger Report.