Mapping Rural Colleges
The SSTAR Lab is excited to announce a new data mapping tool and report on the geography of college opportunity—exploring where postsecondary programs are offered and the communities they serve. We focus on diverse types of postsecondary programs and on rural areas. Our tool, developed in partnership with the Applied Population Lab, is designed to allow users to explore “what counts” as higher education from a place-based perspective.
We learned several useful lessons through this study:
- Postsecondary learning happens in unusual places all over the country. We found meaningful course offerings in administration and extension offices, K-12 settings, and hospitals. We also identified postsecondary programs in correctional facilities, military bases, and hotels. Users can filter by location type in our mapping tool to explore the diverse locations offering programs in their area.
- The data we use to study college opportunity doesn’t capture most of these locations. We used a novel dataset, the U.S. Department of Education’s Database on Accredited Postsecondary Institutions (DAPIP), to expand the types of postsecondary opportunities in our analysis. DAPIP contains over 24,000 locations, compared to just 7,000 in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is usually used for this kind of study. Combing through that data was an enormous task, for which Josh Bach-Hanson and Jared Colston, two of the Lab’s stellar PhD students, deserve a special shout out!
- Rural areas have fewer “traditional” postsecondary opportunities. Public, broad-access institutions that enroll most students who apply are common in rural areas. These institutions expand their reach to rural students by offering programs in K-12 settings and correctional facilities as well as inter-institutional partnerships. It’s important to understand what kinds of programs are offered in these areas because most students stay close to home when they go to college. If rural students have access to different programs nearby, their average postsecondary experiences are also going to be different from students in suburban and urban areas.
- Enrollment in many rural-located institutions is declining. Enrollment in “traditional” institutions located in rural places has been falling since 2010. Public four-year institutions and non-profit four-year institutions have seen falling enrollments in rural areas over the past decade, compared to increases or steady numbers in non-rural areas. Community college enrollment is declining everywhere, but enrollment rates are falling faster in rural areas. These trends indicate serious impacts on rural communities.