Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: A dispatch from my trip to Cambodia.
02: Roadside Attractions: Rural GenZers are undecided.

01: Postcards

He called himself Mr. T, but prettier. He told us Angelina Jolie was his girlfriend, and that she still came to visit, from time to time.

His actual name was Vuthy Hav, but the Hollywood star-turn was part of his bit. With ease, the Cambodian tour guide danced between deep historical accounts and outrageously uncouth mythologies (let’s just say don’t touch the lingams unless you’re ready for a surprise nine months later …)

We had been on the bus together for an hour or so, trying to catch the light rising above Angkor Wat, the temple known as the largest religious complex in the world — and, yes, the backdrop for the Tomb Raider films.

The experience became even more intriguing when I learned that his primary source of education came not from school, but from the monks.

From early childhood to his teenage years, Vuthy studied in the Buddhist Pagodas, waking up at 4 a.m. to prepare breakfast for the “lazy” monks that slept in until 5 a.m. In addition to spiritual teachings, he learned the classics, from basic arithmetic to languages and writing. 

When Vuthy was growing up a few decades ago, it was either go to the monks or don’t get an education at all. And while the nation’s public school systems have improved — students now attend either four-hour morning or afternoon sessions — his experience still isn’t uncommon in Cambodia, where nearly 80% of people live in rural areas.

There were 565 Buddhist schools serving around 17,000 students across Cambodia as of 2012, according to a study from the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown University. 

Most of my job is to cover rural higher education in America. But during a vacation in Cambodia, I was struck by the precarity of the country’s education system. It is after all still reeling from a genocide that killed as many as 2 million people from 1975 to 1979.

It’s been a long road since the Khmer Rouge essentially demolished the nation’s higher education system. Postsecondary enrollment grew from 28,080 students in 2000 to 223,221 in 2020, although the COVID-19 pandemic was a setback, particularly in a nation where tourism is a significant part of its GDP. 

Last year, the Cambodian government upped its education budget to nearly $1 billion — a 9% hike that, along with a pay increase for teachers, was hailed as a step toward improving opportunity.

Still, despite those investments, Cambodians told me they felt a distinct difference between the journeys of the upper-class and the working-class. Many provinces don’t have a local university at all. The cost of relocating to the Phnom Phen area, where nearly all the public and private universities are located, is a major barrier. 

Meanwhile, the wealthiest and most educated residents are likely to send their kids overseas for college — and in doing so, send their country’s best medical, legal, and other talents away with no promise that they will return. 

That story may sound familiar to many communities in rural America. What might not feel so familiar is the reminder that pursuing education has, historically, been a perilous act.

You see, to meet someone like Vuthy is to meet a generational improbability.

When the Khmer Rouge took power, it initially extended open arms, Vuthy says, with the communist party leader Pol Pot declaring that he wanted the best and brightest to join his administration to create a brighter future. 

His officers would ask all teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other educated groups to come forward. Those who did were rounded up and sent to their deaths or concentration camps, as part of a systemic elimination of the educated that killed nearly a quarter of the population. 

People could be picked out of the crowd by guards for any arbitrary sign of being an intellectual or holding a white-collar profession, even something as simple as having smooth hands, lighter skin, or wearing glasses.

Vuthy’s grandparents were interrogated about their educational background, too.

The regime’s forces tried speaking to them in foreign languages, but they stayed mute. They asked if they lived in the city, where many of the more educated Cambodians lived, but his grandfather pointed to his 10 children as proof of his rural roots, saying he needed the extra hands on the farm. 

His family succeeded in bluffing death: They were, in fact, highly educated, with both grandparents working as French teachers in Siem Reap before the genocide. 

It’s a miracle they survived. And thanks to their courage and wits, Vuthy is here to tell stories of his home’s dark past and hopeful future, a surviving reminder of the promise and peril of education.

02: Roadside Attractions

• ‘Least contacted and most undecided.’ Recent research found that the youngest rural Americans feel ignored by politicians and mainstream parties. Yet when given the opportunity, Gen Z wants to be more involved locally, Lucy Tobier writes for The Daily Yonder.
  

• Rural Vermont veterans get legal help. The Vermont Law and Graduate School in rural town of Royalton recently received a $300,000 grant to provide civil legal services to homeless veterans from the U.S. Department of Veterans. The extra aid will help expand the program statewide, which currently has just one full-time attorney yet has served more than 700 Vermont veterans since its founding in 2014.

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