Anna Dorsey | Staff Illustrator

After a 2013 New York Times article identified WashU as having one of the least socioeconomically diverse student bodies among elite colleges, the University has launched several initiatives aimed at diversifying its overall student population. One such focus has been on rural student recruitment, which fully launched in 2023, and has led to a 34% increase in rural first-year enrollment between fall 2023 and fall 2024. 

WashU’s rural students and dedicated outreach staff have worked to increase attempts to recruit heavily from rural locations, a demographic that is often overlooked when admissions officers look to diversify student populations. Just 19 percent of rural Americans hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with an average of 33 percent nationwide. These efforts to recruit students from all walks of life are especially pertinent to admissions officers in the wake of the abolishment of Affirmative Action, which led to a six percentage point drop in WashU’s enrollment of students of color this academic year. 

In 2023, WashU and 31 other universities formed the Small Town and Rural Students (STARS) College Network to offer specialized support to rural students applying to college. STARS defines rural communities as those that have less than 50,000 people and are more than 25 miles from an urban center.

Senior Sierra Milligan said that the programs WashU has developed helped her give back to her rural community.

“My rural experience has given me the ability to help other people,” Milligan said. “That’s just never something that occurred to me before this program. In my hometown, I think over half of the people didn’t attend college when I graduated, and I was the only one to go to a school like WashU. [I didn’t think that] kids from my hometown [could go to places like] WashU.”

WashU’s newly formed Heartland Initiative supports rural students by providing resources and equipping them with the skills they need to navigate a challenging college environment. The initiative was formed out of a donation made by alum and Emerita Trustee Joyce Buchheit in 2022, and the program began in 2023. 

Associate Director for Rural Recruitment, Dacoda Scarlett, explained that the initiative was necessary because many rural students may feel unprepared when applying to more elite colleges such as WashU because their schools do not offer as much college preparatory curriculum. 

“Due to staffing shortages and budget cuts in different states, a lot of rural high schools can’t offer AP or IB classes, and so a lot of rural students might have less access to the most rigorous courses,” Scarlett said. “Because of geographic isolation, a lot of rural students can’t do dual enrollment either, because there’s not a college near them they can go to.”

Junior Hailey Montgomery said rural students such as herself often meet roadblocks and face high pressure when completing college entrance exams such as the ACT or SAT. 

“WashU was my dream school, I’ve wanted to come here for as long as I can remember, and I was always really intimidated coming here,” Montgomery said. “I only had one opportunity to take the SAT. I only had two AP classes, and if I didn’t do perfectly in school, I felt like there was no way I was able to get in.”

Scarlett explained that recruitment in rural communities is often more difficult than in urban settings, owing to the fact that it is difficult to visit many rural high schools in a day.

“If you go to Chicago, you can visit multiple high schools in one day,” Scarlett said. “But if you’re doing rural recruitment [in rural] Illinois, the next town nearby might be 45 minutes away, and so it takes a lot longer to visit more high schools.”

The Heartland Initiative also founded a summer program that began in the summer of 2023. The program, WashU Rural Scholars Academy, brings rising high school juniors from rural backgrounds to campus for a week. The Academy focuses on acquainting students with the feel of a college campus and the process of taking a college-level course, which is taught over the week by design faculty at WashU. 

High school students from across the country can apply to the program, which is free of charge. The program is competitive, and Scarlett said that they generally offer 40 spots for around 200 applicants. Scarlett clarified that the program is to help students become acclimated to college and is not a program that boosts or guarantees admission to WashU specifically.

Throughout the week, students learn how to physically navigate a college campus, how to craft a compelling application to elite universities, and more practical skills. Current WashU students who come from rural backgrounds serve as Rural Peer Ambassadors (RPA) and support the students enrolled in the program.

Montgomery, who is an RPA, explained that the summer academy is important to rural students for forming communities and meeting people who have similar experiences.

“There is a specific bond [between] people that are from rural towns,” Montgomery said. “We’d be like, ‘Oh, were you in FFA (Future Farmers of America) in your high school?’ ‘Oh, yeah, I was in FFA.’ Or, ‘What do you prefer, the county fair or Friday night football games?’”

Sam Fox School design professors Audra Hubbell and Amy Auman teach the design course as part of the summer academy. Hubbell and Auman explained that students are given a project to envision an addition to campus to make it more engaging. 

“The students are tasked with a week-long project of designing a playful intervention,” Hubbell said. “We talk about how across our campus, you need moments that elicit a pause and a break from the daily grind, and so they design an intervention that thinks about all those things.”

Auman said rural students take away meaningful experiences from design thinking and the artistic process, subjects which some of them haven’t been exposed to before.  

“We had a few students after the program talk to us about how they hadn’t taken art classes or design classes,” Auman said. “I think they’re really excited by it. Some folks were expressing a desire to go in that area, or at least implement this kind of work into what they’re thinking about for their own majors and careers.”

Rural students at WashU have also organized to create a new club on campus. Milligan, who is also the president of the Rural Students Collective, formed the group because she saw a lack of support networks for rural students. 

“A lot of us were the only person from our school [to attend WashU] in over five years,” Milligan said. “The transition from rural, versus a suburb area or the city is just such a stark difference, so it’s really nice to have other people who have kind of the same experiences we had when growing up.” 

Milligan said that a challenge that rural students are often faced with is that they go from schools in their rural community, which are often very tight-knit, to a larger college campus with thousands of people.

“My town was on the larger side, but it was still really tight-knit where everyone knew each other,” Milligan said. “So switching to college, where it just wasn’t a class of like 40 people anymore, was a very weird adjustment.”

Major adjustments, such as a larger campus, public transit access, or the sheer quantity of things to do in a city, can be difficult for students who are used to rural areas to navigate.

Milligan mentioned another challenge that rural students face when applying to colleges is a resource gap in understanding the admissions process. She said one of her friends from her hometown threw away a letter from QuestBridge since she didn’t know about the program, which helps low-income students access elite colleges. 

Miligan said the Collective hosts events where rural students can get to know each other and find connections between themselves. 

“Something we did was a Friendsgiving [where] everyone did presentations on their hometown,” she said. “It was this moment where we all got to kind of laugh and joke together and see pictures of each other’s hometown. It was questions like, ‘How many stoplights does your town have?’ ‘Mine has one, yours has three.’”

Scarlett said these recruitment strategies are critical not only for supporting rural students, but also as a way to diversify the student body and capture a range of experiences. Scarlett explained that while many may view rural students as a homogenous body, they are in fact very diverse.

“Rural recruitment is a very new method that a lot of universities are using to continue to recruit and enroll diverse students,” Scarlett said. “Throughout the country, there are dynamic and thriving communities of color that are in rural communities. For instance, the only Latinx-majority community in Iowa is West Liberty, not somewhere like Iowa City.”

These recruitment methods have, so far, shown to be effective, as seen in the chart Scarlett provided to Student Life below. Notably, there was a 34% increase between fall 2023 and fall 2024 in rural first-year enrollment. 

Change in enrollment in rural students from FL23-FL24 (Data courtesy of WashU Recruitment Office)

Montgomery explained that after getting into WashU, having the opportunity to give back to her rural peers by serving as an peer advisor was something she was excited to do.

“Coming here, getting in, and knowing that there were other high school students that wanted to come to WashU, I was immediately on board if there was any way that I could help them,” Montgomery said. “[Being a peer advisor] was something I was really excited about.”

Milligan, too, is optimistic about rural students and their place at WashU. She shared that many traits that rural students have, such as a proclivity for tight-knight communities, prepare them for college.

“I was always worried that my rural background didn’t prepare me for [college],” Milligan said. “I think the rural student collective and being a rural peer ambassador has given me the opportunity to tell other students that their rural backgrounds aren’t a problem or something to hide, but it’s actually one of their strongest qualities.”