Educated Out

"A former third grade teacher in rural Tennessee, sociologist Mara Tieken attended one of her former students' graduation from high school and was struck that not one of the graduates was headed to the kind of elite four-year college where she had landed a tenure-track job. Her students were representative of a larger national phenomenon: In 2015, 28 percent of rural adults aged 25 and older held some sort of postsecondary degree, compared to 41 percent of urban adults. Rural students also trail nonrural students in educational attainment, especially bachelor's degrees from selective colleges. Why? Tieken asked. And what happened to the handful of rural students who did attend expensive and prestigious schools far from home? Tieken followed a group of nine students at a university she calls Hilltop, an elite New England private school. Through interviews with the students and their parents, Tieken describes critical moments in their educational lives when their rural origins mattered most: She shows how students, when applying to college, are hindered by limited college counseling resources. Once they've arrived on campus, they embrace opportunities and struggle to make sense of new social and academic climates. But as students approach graduation, Tieken shows, being "educated out" becomes a complicated burden to bear. None want to return home, and while some find jobs in big cities, others can't afford to. College thus requires an impossible sacrifice: for the possibility of a better life and better job prospects, students give up ties to their communities in irreparable ways, sometimes without even attaining the easier, richer life the students and their parents have worked so hard for. Tieken ultimately asks us not only to consider how space drives inequality in college but the choices that are demanded of students who try to escape rurality. Our stratified economic system depends on cheap rural labor, driving young people away from their communities. Without meaningful economic change, some students will have to make the impossible choice to leave home-and far more will remain at the margins with no way out"--