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 surprising Silicon Slopes pipeline.
02: Roadside Attractions: Are rural jobs getting better?

01: Postcards

Nestled between the farmlands and mountaintops of central Utah, Snow College has more than just natural beauty going for it. 

It is an all-Steinway school, an honor bestowed on only a couple hundred colleges with the pianos worldwide, and its jazz program was a longtime partner with the Juilliard School, creating an unlikely musical pipeline from rural Ephraim to bustling New York.

It is also an emerging tech talent hub, with a new software engineering degree that feeds its rural students into a number of top startups, taking advantage of its hour-and-a-half proximity to the Silicon Slopes south of Salt Lake City.

Those programs have made the rural 5,000-student school stand out nationally, but its local presence is strongly felt too, says Lisa Laird, director of the college’s Career Center.

“We are the only college career center in the country that is also part of its local economic development office,” Laird says. “That’s allowed us to remain hyper aware of the needs of rural Utah, and the need we have to keep our brains here.” Rural communities have long worried about “brain drain,” the historic trend of a region’s best and brightest students leaving for university and never coming back.

Well before the pandemic made it more accessible, Snow College realized that promoting remote work could be critical toward reversing those trends and keeping more of their talent in the area. 

Roughly 40% of its students say they would like to stay in rural Utah if they can find the right opportunity there, Laird says. 

To help them, Snow College decided in 2018 to use Handshake, a jobs platform founded by former students of Michigan Tech University in the upper peninsula of Michigan. 

“The pain point for our three co-founders was that they were struggling to get access to the same type of Silicon Valley employers that their friends at more centrally-located schools were experiencing,” says Christine Cruzvergara, the chief education strategy officer at Handshake.

While Snow College students may have only seen regional job opportunities posted before, Handshake exposes them to jobs from more than 900,000 employers across its 1,500 college and university partner network.

Those jobs can be sorted by area of study, and are posted directly on Snow College’s department pages, so students can easily find work that fits their interests.

“We push it hard and heavy with our health majors, who have found work everywhere from hospitals to local doctor’s offices,” says Laird, who appreciates how the platform was “founded by rural people who understand rural.” 

“Nearly all of our students have taken advantage of Handshake to find a local job or really good remote jobs, whether it’s communication majors becoming content creators for websites or software engineers working for businesses on the Silicon Slopes.” 

The employers posting jobs on Handshake are intentionally advertising to students or recent graduates, and are happy to work with early-career applicants. That’s a marked difference from LinkedIn or Indeed, where students may get frustrated while competing against professionals with more experience.

“Other platforms are not inherently designed for somebody who has zero to no experience,” Cruzvergara says. “Both sides know what to expect.”

The work with Handshake has gone a long way to helping Snow College deliver on its bold pledge for every student to graduate debt-free with “resume-worthy experience,” and to have a plan for their future after graduating.

“We can’t do that 100% but oh, gosh, we are trying,” Laird says. 

Snow College’s partnership is just one intriguing example of how rural communities can leverage digital tools like Handshake to give students more opportunities to stay locally.

At the K-12 school district in the Northwest Arctic Borough of Alaska, administrators used the tech platform to host virtual events for its indigenous populations in areas they previously couldn’t reach through online programs.

The Baton Rouge Area Chamber found that a lot of its small and midsize companies struggled to attract college grads to their roles. Home to Louisiana State University, they were often competing with large acquisition teams from out-of-state employers for LSU students.

Baton Rouge responded by pushing all its nearby colleges to move onto Handshake, so local employers had one central place to recruit students for internships and jobs — and it has led to some significant results as more and more students have joined the platform.

Handshake has become “a key piece of workforce solutions for talent in our region” since their partnership began in 2020, the Chamber reported in its annual report card last year.

02: Roadside Attractions

• Rural opportunities are improving. Georgetown University recently found that working adults in rural America are almost as likely (50%) as working adults in urban America (54%) to have a job that pays middle-class wages, a trend driven particularly by the strength of the blue-collar economy.

  • However, the report also reinforced major challenges of population decline, low bachelor’s degree attainment (at 25%) and a high rate of labor-force nonparticipation (26%).
    

• Data shows disproportionate rural transfers. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in its Daily Briefing newsletter that rural students are transferring at higher rates than their peers, even as the number of transfers overall increased by 5.3 percent between the fall of 2022 and fall of 2023, according to National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data.

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