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: Addressing the Rural Access Gap

01: Postcards

Not many college presidents can claim an executive producer credit — but now Nicole Hurd of Lafayette College can.

That’s thanks to the launch of “The Class,” a new PBS docuseries that follows six Deer Valley High School students and their college advisor through the application process during the pandemic.

The project offers a rare and intimate window into the lives of high school seniors, and was led by the College Advising Corps, while Hurd was still the CEO of the organization.

What Hurd started as a pilot program at the University of Virginia in 2005 has exploded into an organization that has helped more than 525,000 low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented students enroll in higher education.

Today, CAC has over 800 advisors in 795 high schools, with students who work with CAC advisors being 18% more likely to apply to college, 19% more likely to be accepted, and 24% more likely to apply for scholarships.

In this interview, Hurd talks about what it was like to put the advising challenge on air, what she’s learned about advising rural students, and how she is now taking that knowledge to engage them in eastern Pennsylvania.

Q: How did rural communities factor into CAC’s beginnings?

I remember the first advisor we placed in really rural Virginia. I remember some people saying, “Why is he coming from UVA? They’re not interested in our students, they’re only interested in the affluent schools in Northern Virginia.”

That was very much part of the mythology around UVA at the time.

The advisor, he was from rural Virginia himself. And the first thing he did was go hunting with the principal. All of a sudden people were thinking: “Wait a second, there are people that look and talk and do things like us, from UVA? I thought everybody was just from the D.C. suburbs.”

The program was really about taking recent college graduates — people who already understand the language of higher education and things like financial aid, because they had already gone through the FAFSA process — and placing them in places where they could relate to the students and help them.

It creates just a beautiful sense of “If you can see it, you can be it.”

Q: Tell us about the new PBS docuseries "The Class" and what it reveals about college access during the pandemic.

When I was CEO at CAC, we decided that we wanted people to see this work. We chose to follow this advisor, Cam, who is incredibly thoughtful. There was something magical about Cam and his relationship with those 6 students that really made a compelling story.

Right when we started filming, we started to see clippings and dailies, and all of a sudden we're in a pandemic. And so the filmmakers called me, panicked, saying, 'Do we still do this?'

It's one of those moments where you have to think about—we're doing something nobody's ever done before. If there was a time to be bold and brave, it was then.

So we ended up catching the students in a really important year. Not just because of the college access issues, but because there are things to learn about the pandemic and about community that we haven't processed yet.

I think those things become very alive when you watch the series.

Q: What differences have you noticed between rural and urban schools when it comes to college access?

There are some universal things, like being scared to talk to your parents about going to college because they might not have gone, or having these ratios where the guidance counselor to the student ratio is way above the 250:1 that's recommended.

Rural schools are a little more challenging in terms of just exposure. Most students go to school about 50 miles from college. They don't go far-flung places, and there are less opportunities in the rural areas of our country to think about seeing yourself at a 4-year institution.

We have this beautiful community college system. We've got this incredibly interesting ecosystem of higher education, and if we lifted it up and talked about it in different ways, I think rural students would have more access.

Q: Are we making progress in closing the college access gap in rural areas?

There's been progress. But it's not as robust as any of us would like it to be.

Technology helps where things you can do that are transactional: You can help somebody fill out a form. You can remind them of dates. However, I think you have to have both technology and inspiration, and that inspiration piece really has to come from another human being.

I don't think there's a website or a chatbot in the world that is going to convince a young person to go to college if they don't believe it themselves yet.

That kind of personal mentoring takes time. Especially in rural areas, where the college attainment might not be as high as in other places, where there might not be other examples readily available of people that have gone to college in their families. That hump is even bigger.

We have had the best success in rural placement is where the advisor came from a rural area him or herself, where they can speak in ways that really allow a student to feel like 'I can do this. And if I do do this, I'm not going to lose my ties to my family. I'm not going to be making myself transform in ways where I won't recognize myself.”

Q: How does a school like Lafayette College think about recruiting rural students?

What's interesting about a place like this is that it's not overwhelming for students who come from a rural background. Sometimes when we're doing the college advising work, people would say, 'I'm not sure I'm ready to go to a school with 60,000 students. That feels like a lot.' We're at 2,700-2,750. So it's a much more intimate learning environment.

We talk a lot about a demographic cliff in this country. It's true we have a demographic cliff, but when colleges aren't recruiting in rural Pennsylvania, rural Missouri, rural Texas, then we're leaving talent on the sidelines while we're still complaining about a demographic cliff.

We can't be complacent. We can't be, if I dare say, lazy. We have to get out there and explain that we are an engine of opportunity, and that we want you.

There was a time where higher ed maybe didn't have to do that work. But that's not where we are anymore.

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email [email protected], or check out our advertising information page. Support my work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.