Welcome to Mile Markers, a twice-a-month newsletter about rural higher education.

Last week, I hopped in a car with a team of researchers from the Rural Talent Lab to hear directly from community members about how new opportunities for job training might best support the places they call home. 

As we worked our way up the east side of Montana, visiting Colstrip and Glasgow, and then across the state to the northwest region and Thompson Falls, it was clear how vital this listening approach will be to developing new pathways in rural communities.

What stood out to me the most were how stories differed from region to region and town to town within Montana. In many ways, industry has shaped the culture of these communities. Throughout Colstrip, signs like one that read “Coal helps us bake our bread” on Subway’s doors were plastered on buildings. So, if you didn’t notice the towering power plant, you knew that energy was part of this company town’s story. Compare that to Thompson Falls where tourism was the first word uttered as people talked through the affordable housing crisis and the difficulty to find workers during hunting seasons.

At the same time, though, some common threads ran as strong as the rushing rivers through Montana: pride in their communities, in the family-owned businesses, in the reservations and connection to history and culture.

These lessons have reaffirmed to me just how important it will be to approach storytelling about rural higher education in a similarly community-centered way.

In listening sessions with superintendents, business owners, community college leaders and more, we heard about what made these places special, and both the challenges and opportunities that persist. Meanwhile, other researchers walked around town and interviewed people at community centers, libraries, coffee shops and hardware stores.

More stories are already surfacing as I reflect on this trip, and I’m looking forward to reaching back out to some of the people I’ve met and reporting more in future newsletters. I also hope to follow this project and compare how the pathways that the state implements in fall 2027 match what we’ve heard. 

For now, I wanted to take you inside the conversations we had with residents around the state. These research-focused “town halls” were not public meetings, and participants’ feedback remained anonymous. Because of this, you will notice that I do not often attribute comments to specific people in my reflections.

When we arrived in eastern Montana, people in both Glasgow and Colstrip wanted us to know one thing: Eastern Montana is different. It’s not like western Montana, and it’s certainly not like other rural places in the country. It’s more frontier than rural, more than one person said.

People shared that this shaped their rural identity but also their challenges. 

People who live in Lame Deer, which is on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, said they are 104 miles from a Walmart. At school districts in the area, there is such a lack of population density that multiple high schools have combined to form one football team. 

When someone needs to go to the dentist in Glasgow, sometimes they take the Amtrak train to reach care. Other times, people must fly an hour and a half from the town branded as the “Middle of Nowhere” to see a specialist in Billings via Cape Air, an essential air service that Montana Free Press reported on in 2019. 

Because of this distance from town to town, many people across the three towns we visited said they take pride in their self-reliance and ability to wear many hats. In Glasgow, Gregg Hunter serves as a state senator – representing a district that takes at least two and a half hours to drive across — but he also works in public relations, sits on the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, works as an EMT, and is the town’s locksmith. And he’s not the only one with a resume that long.

My understanding was that “frontier” related to remoteness but also people’s abilities to rely on each other for the services they need.

In Colstrip, a leader at a small tribal college told a story about a parent who knows that when she needs to bring her child to classes, she can hand the baby off to one of the staff or faculty. 

Montana has seven tribal colleges, and despite some having enrollment below 300 students, they often serve as the heartbeat of communities, providing not just education but cultural connection – and in this case, family support. (We explored the childcare challenges facing many Montana residents in this story reported in partnership with the Montana Free Press.) 

In Glasgow, people said they often tell others about how supportive their community is. If someone is sick and needs to raise money for surgery or treatment, they’ve seen people come together and raise as much as $60,000. The community has similarly rallied to support big projects like a new pool or wrestling center.

In Circle, a town with fewer than 600 people that we passed through in eastern Montana, the EMT service is entirely volunteer-run. According to the county’s website, 16 volunteers have stepped up to serve.

People also recognized that often one institution or organization cannot do this alone. Business leaders in Thompson Falls, for example, applauded the school district for introducing students to new career paths, and they wanted to see the school do even more like establish a trade school. But they said they know, too, that their schools are severely understaffed and would need the support of business leaders and likely additional staff to make anything like that happen.

In Colstrip, one community leader said she saw opportunity in programs that combined both remote learning and hands-on training through partnerships between the state university system and local employers. But while this has worked in some cases, like the veterinary tech program at Great Falls College - Montana State University, others acknowledged that it can be hard to find in-person training for other areas like EKG technicians or phlebotomists.

Across the state, scale is also a challenge that collaboration could solve. How do you argue for an investment in a plumbing program when your community only needs two plumbers? Some suggested that partnering across institutions, creating regional collaborations with colleges and employers, may help address this.

But the solution may look different for each community. It is up to the state team, who listened into each session and will receive feedback from the research team in September, to decide whether they will implement pathways that are hyperlocal, regional or statewide. 

In Montana, it is likely that they will build on recent statewide changes prompted by last year’s STARS Act and related future-ready payments that incentivize K-12 schools to offer dual enrollment and trades-based learning. Angela McLean, director of American Indian/minority achievement and K-12 partnerships, has led a lot of these efforts. She joined three others representing the state on the tour last week: Joe Thiel, deputy commissioner for academic, research, and student affairs; Quincie Jones, executive director of career & technical education at Great Falls College and Eric Meredith, director of institutional analysis.

People also frequently told us that they want to stay in the rural places they love – especially when you add the cultural pull of tribal and ranching communities. However, for many, residents and community leaders said that’s not an option.

Gaps in access to affordable housing, childcare and healthcare came up in every site we visited – and Andrew Koricich, project director for Rural Talent Lab, said these themes were present when they visited West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kansas, too. 

Because you can’t talk about supporting a thriving rural community through education or training without recognizing the basic needs of the people who live there, including access to food and clean water. 

Koricich and Adam Ray, deputy director of Rural Talent Lab, shared that there may be some opportunities to help meet those needs through training programs. For example, in Kansas, they toured a program at Fort Hays Tech that trained construction technology students to build affordable housing stock for their communities.

I also spoke with a few of the coaches from HCM Strategists who are working with the state teams to apply the findings from these listening tours, like Kathleen Cleary who talked about the potential of bringing community colleges, employers and other community partners together to help establish more child care services.

Now that the research team has wrapped up each of the listening tours, they will gather all the feedback and present it to the states this fall.

In the meantime, if you live in one of these states or want to talk about this project more, I would love to hear your thoughts. Please feel free to email me.

Thanks for loving rural communities, and I’ll be back in a couple weeks. As always, please send any story ideas or feedback my way.

All my best,

Emily

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