AMHERST, Mass. — Crowding around an Amherst College campus fire pit, earnest-looking high school seniors offered fire-building suggestions as intently as if they were taking a final exam.
"This is our test of how rural you are," the college's assistant dean of admissions, Nathan Grove, joked before he finally got the neatly stacked logs to ignite so the group could make s'mores: "how good you are at making a fire."
The occasion was a two-day visit to encourage admitted applicants to enroll — including this particular group. These students hail from rural places where top-ranked private colleges like Amherst rarely used to recruit. This gathering around the fire pit was an attempt to make them feel welcome.
"I was frankly sort of shocked that they cared about rural students," said Jack Hancock, a high school senior from rural Milford, Pa., a town of about 1,100 on the state's eastern border with New Jersey. He had overcome the steep 1-in-13 odds of getting into Amherst and was there with his parents to decide if he'd attend.
Coaxing rural high school graduates to enroll at some of the nation's most selective colleges is the next step in a campaign that started three years ago with a push to get them simply to apply.
That's when a wealthy Missouri-born alumnus and trustee of the University of Chicago, Byron Trott, invested $20 million to start the STARS College Network, for Small Town and Rural Students, to encourage selective colleges to recruit from rural places.
Trott learned that while nearly a quarter of the American population is rural, as he was when he'd gone to college, only 3% of the students at his alma mater were.
As STARS has built momentum, more than 90,000 rural students applied to its member institutions last year, up 15% over the year before, the organization says. Now the work has turned to getting these students to actually show up on campus in the fall and graduate four years later.
Trott's foundation has since injected another $150 million into STARS, which has expanded from 16 member schools to 32, including Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and Yale.
With support from that fund, each has agreed to recruit at rural high schools seldom visited by university admissions officers. A 2019 study found those institutions were more likely to show up at higher-income public and private high schools in cities and suburbs.
Ninety percent of rural students graduate from high school, more than their peers in cities or suburbs, according to the U.S. Department of Education. But only a little more than half go straight to college, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports.
That number is down since 2016 and is lower than the nearly 60% of urban and 63% of suburban high school graduates who go.
"This process is moving into not just the 'to college' part but the 'through college' part," said Marjorie Betley, deputy director of admissions at the University of Chicago and STARS' executive director.
That may not be easy. Rural Americans are less likely than those in cities or suburbs to think college actually benefits students, and more likely to believe it has a negative effect on political views and personal values, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds.
"A lot of people don't think it's worth it," Hancock said of his classmates back in Pennsylvania and their parents. Most who do choose to continue their education go to a community college or the local branch of the state university, he said — not to selective institutions.
"Part of the reason that distrust can grow, especially when we think about distrust in higher education, is that as colleges and universities, we haven't been there for them," Betley said. Until recently, she said, "we haven't shown up, and we haven't shown them that we are people who you can trust."
So deep is this conviction that, when Hancock's brother went off to a private college last year, his mother, Jodi, ordered the smallest-sized car window decal of the logo, so as not to draw attention. "That's a rural cultural idea, that you don't want to put yourself better than anybody," she said. "We certainly didn't want to put on airs."
Private colleges can also be hard to afford for rural households, whose median income the U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates is 12 percent lower than the national average, even after accounting for a lower cost of living.
"You can sort of tell it immediately when you're on these tours," said the younger Hancock, who drove with his parents to several of them. "Certain ones would have a lot more higher-wealth suburban people. Maybe they went to private school. They dressed in designer fashions."
He became interested in Amherst — where he would ultimately decide to enroll — because it offered an in-person overnight visit specifically for rural students.
Other things that discourage rural high school graduates from going on to college are harder to quantify, experts said, including homesickness and a sense that they don't belong. Rural students who do end up enrolling are more likely to drop out than their urban and suburban classmates and less likely to make it to graduation than suburban students, National Student Clearinghouse figures show.
Challenges for rural students
Olivia Meier has seen two things hold back friends in Chugiak, Alaska, where she's a college-bound high school senior: "The first is cost, and the second is not knowing what we're capable of."
Although her school northeast of Anchorage has a 91 percent graduation rate, which is higher than the national average, only 48 percent of its graduates go on to college, state figures show.
"A lot of people, they just don't see it in the cards for them," said Meier. They think "the schools are too selective for us to be able to get into."
She shared that self-doubt, Meier said — until she heard that someone in the class ahead of hers had been admitted to the University of Chicago.
"I was absolutely shocked, because for me those schools were always something far out that wouldn't necessarily be available to me. It's really easy to doubt yourself when applying to schools like this," said Meier, who ended up being accepted to Amherst through early decision.
A selective college campus "is a pretty rarefied environment," said Mara Tieken, a professor of education at Bates College in Maine and the author of Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges — and What It Costs Them, who began her own career as a teacher in rural New Hampshire and Tennessee.
"No one hunts. No one shops at Walmart. No one listens to country music. So some of the things that would have seemed so familiar to my students would be totally foreign," Tieken said.
Rural students from lower-income families also may not have relatives or friends at home who can help them figure out the complicated application and financial aid processes, since the proportion of rural Americans 25 and older with associate degrees or higher is about a third, compared to nearly half in cities and suburbs.
That's among the reasons behind such things as the event for accepted students at Amherst. Several STARS member schools pick up the tab for prospective students and admitted applicants from rural areas to spend a day or two on their campuses. More than 1,000 students took advantage of that opportunity last year, sitting in on classes and meals, attending social events and sleeping over.
As college-bound high school senior Catherine Colberg made s'mores at Amherst's fire pit, she compared notes with other rural applicants who had also been admitted about the size of their respective hometowns.
"This is kind of huge to me," said Colberg, after touring the campus of about 1,900 students, including its state-of-the-art science building. She joked that in her hometown of St. Joseph, Minn. — population 7,000 — "my school has, like, one test tube that we all share."
That's not just hyperbole, said Grove, the assistant admissions dean at Amherst, who also has the new role of coordinator of rural outreach. In fact, he said, rural students he's met "have a lot less access to things that would prepare them for college."
Ryan Peipher has seen this even at Amherst, where he's a junior who was admitted before the college started making a concerted effort to increase its rural student numbers.
"A good portion of Amherst students come from private Northeastern schools, who have been in upper-level chemistry, upper-level classes and had experiences that rural students haven't had," said Peipher, a neuroscience major from Lancaster, Pa., who helped start a rural student support group.
Many of his classmates have stronger personal and professional networks, he said. "It's very easy for a student who comes to Amherst from a Philadelphia private school to network with someone who is also in finance who they know from a family friend," he said. "But for a student from rural America who doesn't have any family members or any connections to the finance industry, how can they network? How can they get that first leg up?"
Overall, however, increasing the number of rural students in college benefits them — and the colleges they choose to attend, said Amherst President Michael Elliott.
In a polarized time, "students growing up in rural areas bring perspectives and experiences that students from urban environments don't have," Elliott said. "They've grown up in different regions where maybe the politics feel different, where the culture feels different, and we are interested in the prospect of bringing students together with a diversity of experiences to learn from one another."
Last year, after joining STARS, Amherst admitted 96 students from small towns and rural areas, the university said — up from 70 the year before — helped in part by comparatively generous financial aid supported by its $3.9 billion endowment. The proportion of students on the campus who are rural has increased as a result, from 6% to 11%, a college spokeswoman said. This year, she said, Amherst accepted 119 rural applicants.
Small though those increases may seem, advocates said, they also are important in the long run for rural areas, where fewer than half of people in their teens and 20s are hopeful they'll find good jobs, according to a Gallup survey.
For many rural students, however, it's still true that "going to a selective school like Amherst, or just any school out of state, seems mystical," said Kara Lewis, an Amherst junior from Mardela Springs, a town of about 350 in eastern Maryland. "It seems like something from a movie."
Doing it herself, she said, did something unexpected: It made her appreciate where she came from.
"There's a very romantic sense that lots of students have coming from rural areas where it's, like, 'I wish I could get out of here,'" she said. In fact, she said of her hometown, "I realized how unique it was. And I love it, like I never did when I was actually living there."
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
Edited by: Nirvi Shah and Steve Drummond
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson
Copyright 2026 Hechinger Report