National effort to connect rural students with colleges expands to Texas

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Savannah Hunsucker didn’t have a college counselor to talk to at her rural high school outside Wichita, Kansas.

She didn’t know if her grades were good enough to get into the academically rigorous universities she was interested in. Few recruiters visited her school and she couldn’t travel to the universities she was eyeing, so she leaned on Google searches to prepare her college applications.

“To have college [recruiters] come out and tell us about their school, even for schools that were local — that was pretty rare,” said Hunsucker, who is now a rising junior at Southern Methodist University.

Hunsucker said she wishes she had a contact at SMU when she was 18.

STARS College Network, a group focused on improving educational attainment in rural communities, is changing how two Texas schools are getting students like Hunsucker the information they need to enroll in college.

Students from rural communities in Texas are less likely to enroll in college and get their postsecondary degrees compared to their peers in suburban and urban regions. That’s because they have fewer local resources available and fewer class options to prepare them for college, according to a report from the The University of Texas Education Resource Center.

College recruiters may be less likely to visit small towns and rural communities because of the cost of travel, which means high school students in those areas get less information about their higher education options.

But since STARS was created, representatives from 16 colleges in the network have visited classrooms at 1,100 small-town high schools. STARS, which receives funding from the Trott Family Foundation, gives schools in the network a minimum of $200,000 per year to help them recruit students from rural areas.

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Colleges in the network partner up and travel as a collective to high schools around the country. They can also use the money from STARS to cover the cost of travel and housing so students from rural regions can visit their campuses for free.

“There's this huge information gap that students get left out of when colleges and universities don't visit them,” said STARS executive director Marjorie Betley, who helped create the program. “We were addressing that.”

The effort also comes at a time when colleges struggle to bring back enrollment numbers after the COVID-19 pandemic.

STARS is scaling to reach Texas students. Southern Methodist in Dallas and the University of Texas at Austin are the first Texas schools the network has added to its member list. The two schools will receive funds and guidance for the next 10 years.

Southern Methodist University plans to use the funds to visit more high schools in the Rio Grande Valley and East Texas, dean of admissions Elena Hicks said. As part of those visits, SMU representatives need to explain how the majors they offer can be applied in their hometowns in case students return after graduation.

“You find your place, you find your people,” Hicks said. “And if a student wants to go back to the rural community, they can go back and find a job.”

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: Google, Southern Methodist University and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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