Rural students have fewer options as colleges eliminate programs

Around 13 million rural students, mostly in the Midwest and the Great Plains, live in higher education “deserts,” where there are no colleges or universities located nearby, or where community college is the only available postsecondary option, says The Hechinger Report. Financial pressures and declining enrollment have further squeezed these areas’ remaining institutions, prompting schools to either close their doors completely or eliminate a large number of certificate and degree programs. As a result, rural students have fewer higher education options, particularly in comparison to their peers in cities and suburbs.

“We are asking rural folks to accept a set of options that folks in cities and suburbs would never accept,” says Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education at North Carolina’s Appalachian State University. “In a lot of rural places, the idea of choice is sort of a fiction. If you only have one option, you don’t really have choice.”

Related: Funding shortfalls, enrollment declines threaten rural college students’ access to a growing list of academic disciplines >

Limited opportunities

Over a dozen private nonprofit rural-serving colleges and universities have closed since 2020, and those that are still open are cutting programs. Fewer rural high school graduates are also going to college. According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, nearly 55% of the high school graduating class of 2023 enrolled in college right after high school, down from 61% of the class of 2016.

Flagship institutions, such as West Virginia University and the University of Montana, have figured prominently in the news for eliminating over two dozen certificate and degree programs, but most cuts have occurred at regional public universities. The latter receive around $1,100 less per student in state funding than flagships while educating 70% of public four-year university students. These schools also enroll more low-income and first-generation college students, have fewer resources than schools in urban areas or flagships, and have smaller endowments.

Some colleges are left with very limited paths forward due to financial losses and falling student enrollment, experts say. At Delta State University in Mississippi, an enrollment decline of nearly a quarter since 2014 has led to an $11 million hole in its budget, university President Daniel Ennis said last year. The school is ending 21 of its 61 degree programs, including degrees in history, English, chemistry, and accountancy. Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University and the University of Alaska System have each cut at least 40 degree programs in history, economics, and earth sciences, according to The Hechinger Report. Other regional public institutions, including the State University of New York (SUNY) Potsdam, the University of North Carolina Asheville, and Dickinson State University in North Dakota, have also discontinued language, physics, and philosophy programs.

Higher education institutions that serve low-income and Black students are also impacted by these trends. The University of North Carolina Greensboro—where over half of all undergraduates are first-generation students, students of color, and Pell grant recipients—is cutting 20 degree programs, including anthropology and physics.

Many of these cuts are making humanities and language programs less accessible to rural Americans than to their urban and suburban counterparts, even though those subjects “do much of the work of helping students dream beyond their realities,” Michael Theune, English Department Chair at Illinois Wesleyan University, tells The Hechinger Report. Illinois Wesleyan, a private nonprofit institution known for its liberal arts programs, cut degrees in religion, anthropology, French, and Italian. Without offering a variety of programs, Theune says, “we are paring down the sense of the vastness of our world and the possibilities of university students to experience it differently.”