During her first semester at Southern Methodist University, Savannah Hunsucker went on a retreat with the other students enrolled in her leadership scholars program. The event took them away from the Dallas campus and into the Texas countryside.

“I remember everybody looking up and being surprised to see stars in the night sky, and I thought that was so odd,” Hunsucker says.

Stars were a familiar sight for her, having grown up in a small town 30 miles north of Wichita, Kansas. Yet seeing her classmates’ awe at an experience she took for granted made her realize that her rural upbringing set her apart.

Helping more students like Hunsucker feel that they belong at selective colleges is the goal of the STARS College Network. The initiative launched in April 2023 with a group of 16 public and private institutions that committed to improving their efforts at attracting and retaining students who grew up in rural communities. Programs at member colleges include hosting summer learning opportunities and on-campus recruitment events for high schoolers, sending more admissions staff out to high schools in small towns, and tapping current college students to serve as peer mentors to freshmen arriving from places with sparse populations or low density.

This week, the consortium announced that it is doubling its membership — to include 32 colleges and universities (see full list below) — and that its initial benefactor, Trott Family Philanthropies, has committed more than $150 million over 10 years to programs designed to support students from more remote locales.

This growing interest is a recognition of the fact that although federal data shows 90 percent of students from rural regions graduate from high school, only about half go directly to college, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

There are many reasons for this, explains Marjorie Betley, executive director of the STARS College Network and deputy director of admissions at the University of Chicago. Students at rural high schools may lack access to adequate counseling about college options and financial aid, or they may not be offered classes that selective institutions look for among applicants, such as calculus. College admissions officers may never visit their communities. And unlike students in many urban and suburban areas who occasionally walk or drive by universities and see advertisements for degree programs, students living far away from campuses are “not getting these incidental brushes with higher education,” Betley says.

Read the full article about supporting rural college students by Rebecca Koenig at EdSurge.