Colleges got more rural students to apply. The challenge is getting them to attend

"“This is our test of how rural you are,” the college's assistant dean of admissions, Nathan Grove, joked before he finally got the neatly stacked logs to ignite so the group could make s'mores: “how good you are at making a fire.” The occasion was a two-day visit to encourage admitted applicants to enroll including this particular group. These students hail from rural places where top-ranked private colleges like Amherst rarely used to recruit. This gathering around the fire pit was an attempt to make them feel welcome."

"“I was frankly sort of shocked that they cared about rural students,” said Jack Hancock, a high school senior from rural Milford, Pa., a town of about 1,100 on the state's eastern border with New Jersey. He had overcome the steep 1-in-13 odds of getting into Amherst and was there with his parents to decide if he'd attend. Coaxing rural high school graduates to enroll at some of the nation's most selective colleges is the next step in a campaign that started three years ago with a push to get them simply to apply."

"That's when a wealthy Missouri-born alumnus and trustee of the University of Chicago, Byron Trott, invested $20 million to start the STARS College Network, for Small Town and Rural Students, to encourage selective colleges to recruit from rural places. Trott learned that while nearly a quarter of the American population is rural, as he was when he'd gone to college, only 3% of the students at his alma mater were. As STARS has built momentum, more than 90,000 rural students applied to its member institutions last year, up 15% over the year before, the organization says."

"Now the work has turned to getting these students to actually show up on campus in the fall and graduate four years later. Trott's foundation has since injected "

A two-day Amherst College visit welcomed admitted rural high school seniors through informal activities like building fires and making s’mores. The effort targets students from rural communities that have historically received little recruitment from top private colleges. The STARS College Network for Small Town and Rural Students was launched with $20 million from Byron Trott after he learned that only 3% of University of Chicago students came from rural backgrounds despite rural people making up nearly a quarter of the U.S. population. STARS reports that more than 90,000 rural students applied to member institutions last year, and the next goal is increasing campus enrollment and four-year graduation rates.

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