Using Rural University-School-Partnerships for the Higher Education We Need

By Dr. Crystal R. Chambers and Dr. Loni Crumb

East Carolina University

Recently proposed changes to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) could reduce the amount of federal financial aid available to farmers and other small business owners (Knott, 2023). By accounting for land as assets that can be sold for income, the same way one can mortgage a home, the proposed policy overlooks that for farmers, land is not as readily fungible and is the source of a family’s income. Most farmers own small to mid-size farms, but federal legislation tends to support larger agribusiness. Moreover, farm workers without the privilege of land ownership continue to lack the same federal protections of other workers. Since the Industrial Revolution, rural, agrarian life at best was a second thought of federal legislative initiatives. Amid negotiations for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Southern Democrats were willing to trade retirement and survivorship benefits (the Social Security Act of 1935), minimum wage, and other worker protections (the Wagner Act of 1935) to maintain racial hierarchy (Katznelson, 2013). Furthermore, pursuant to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, federal subsidies paid to landowning farmers to increase crop values by refraining from planting harmed tenant farmers Black and White: unplanted crops = no harvest = no income to tenant farmers.

Here, we consider higher education for the world we need, we advance the notion that we need to bring farm life generally, rural life specifically, from the margin to the center of higher education policy. Rural education K-16 often resides at the periphery of both the policy arena and academia (McShane & Smarick, 2018; Schafft, 2016; see also Center for American Progress, 2020). Not only is “The peripheralization of rural ... detrimental to rural people and places (Schafft, p. 138),...a critical and pragmatic rethinking of education policy in the rural context may help to illuminate new educational practices that enhance the vitality of rural communities and clarify a U.S. rural policy” (p. 139). This is because, within rural communities, education is a principle site for rural social and economic development.  In the elementary and secondary education arena, schools are geographically situated in many rural communities which is important when trying to provide services and build community among people who are geographically distant. In rural communities, schools are spaces for physical, mental, and dental health; academic and vocational programming for the entire community; as well as community events that take advantage of the central location of schools (Crumb et al., 2022; Crumb et al., 2019; Crumb & Larkin, 2018). Civic engagement and local politics are school-centered, given the proportion of local funds used to support schools (Hall Sutherland, 2023). Education is typically the largest line item in local budgets (Shuls, 2018). In the higher education arena, regional colleges and universities, including community colleges, can be instrumental in spurring economic and professional opportunities and in partnership with local industry, can serve as catalysts for rural economic growth (Koricich, 2022; Koricich et al., 2020; Littrell & Littrell, 2019; Schafft, 2016).

Creating collaborative approaches, anchored in the rural community, such as university-school-community partnerships can help re-center the development needs of everyday rural peoples and communities. In particular, university-school-community partnerships can be harnessed to positively transform the fabric of rural communities. Rural school-university-community collaborations effectively unify and leverage resources and knowledge among local educators, school administrators, higher education sectors, and community leaders to identify and address local challenges. Moreover, through partnerships, higher education institutions and rural communities can be active in addressing national concerns, such as the national skills shortage (Hopkins, 2020; Perna, 2023).

Rural Human and Cultural Capital

Twenty percent (20%) of elementary and secondary school students in the U.S. attend rural schools (Showalter et al., 2019). While pre-pandemic, the number of rural college students was lower than that of their urban and suburban peers, through the pandemic, the relative share of rural college students has increased and at present is equal to that of urban students (National Student Clearinghouse, 2023). This is because while the share of rural students increased slightly during this period, there was a more substantial decline in urban student enrollments. The increase in rural student college enrollments in the long term will hopefully bridge equity gaps in college enrollment. Work to enhance equality of enrollment opportunities among rural, urban, and suburban students is needed as suburban students continue to outpace their peers in enrollment, even with a pandemic enrollment dip.  

 Gaps in educational attainment between rural adults and their peers, however, are wider. Whereas 37% of people from urban and suburban environments have a baccalaureate or higher degree, only 25% of people in towns and 22% in rural areas hold baccalaureate degrees (NCES, 2023). Baccalaureate degree attainment is an important asset to address endemic intergenerational poverty prevalent in many rural areas (Beale, 1996; Crumb et al., 2022; Walpole, 2007). Degree attainment is also important as part of an overall national goal of bridging the skills gap, the gap between the skills demanded by employers and workers’ education and knowledge base (Biden, 2021; Ogrysko, 2021; Perna, 2023; The White House, 2021). By increasing the educational attainment of rural adults, we can address the national skills shortage.

This is a potential win-win for rural communities and the nation. Rural students bring valuable rural community cultural capital to the national workforce. Utilizing rural resourcefulness, rural ingenuity, rural familism and rural community unity approaches, rural college students are poised to be good stewards, making the best use of the resources they have. Using diverse funds of knowledge and skills, rural students can navigate resource constraints and draw upon familial and other resources to advance their education and local communities (Crumb et al., 2022). By listening to and investing time and other resources into rural communities, we can reduce rural out-migration by developing career and enterprise opportunities for young adults (Clark et al., 2022; Petrin et al., 2014; Schaft, 2016). Moreover, there is evidence that rural community capital is not unique to the United States, but is a characteristic globally (Rapaport et al., 2018; Santoro & Wilkinson, 2016; Ulug & Horlings, 2019; Xuelong & Yongjiu, 2019; Yonggui, 2019). This phenomenon will be explored in future work.

Using University-School-Community Partnerships for Rural Development

To successfully engage in university-school-community partnerships, it is important that all partners enter collaborative work as co-equal partners (Kilos et al., 2015). Universities often bring human resources, the time and space to make connections among partners in addition to the knowledge of faculty, students, and staff. They are also good with connecting communities and schools to fiscal resources including alternative funding for programming. Teachers, school leaders, and other educators often have connections into the community as well as a high-level view of community functions and understanding of areas where improvements can be made. The community has the vantage of knowing itself most broadly and deeply as well as, when considering the rural community capital stocks, has knowledge of community-based resources. Therefore, all partners come to the table with assets. We embrace the position of Kunz et al. (2017) that "partnerships are critical to conducting, implementing and sustaining meaningful and impactful rural education research" (p. 56).

Beyond research, university-community partnerships can provide the infrastructure for sustainable rural development. Rural schools are an economic driving force, as the rural school is often the largest local employer and the presence of a school within rural communities is associated with increased housing values, employment rates and entrepreneurship as well as decreased income inequality (Shaft et al., 2016). Improving housing, transportation, career and educational opportunities in rural areas may help attract new professionals to these areas who may start businesses or launch programs to serve these communities. Moreover, partnerships that build rural economies may influence those who have out-migrated to return to their native communities.  Thus, it is vital to cultivate partnerships with local schools, institutions of higher education, businesses, and community organizations to enhance rural development and sustain essential resources for youth and their families living in rural communities across the United States.

Using Rural University-School-Partnerships for the Higher Education We Need

Of the role of higher education institutions in addressing the skills gap, Hopkins (2020) asserts that institutions must 

address the need for increased collaboration, skills analysis, identifying the skills gap, reviewing and updating curriculum and enabling students, moving the needle towards truly solving this issue will depend on higher education’s and every institutions’ willingness to address these missing pieces. (para. 20)

Higher education institutions can do so with the help of schools and communities through university-school-community partnerships. The power of partnerships is particularly poignant within rural spaces as spatial distance is often accompanied by policy and academic oversight. And yet by leveraging the power of these partnerships, colleges and universities can have the greatest influence on growing the national economy by developing underserved rural areas and valuing the local assets. Moreover, by partnering with rural communities and schools, universities gain the power of rural cultural wealth to address today’s most pressing challenges.

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References

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Biden, Jr., J. R. (2021). Memorandum on revitalizing America’s foreign policy and national security workforce, institutions, and partnerships. The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/02/04/memorandum-revitalizing-americas-foreign-policy-and-national-security-workforce-institutions-and-partnerships/

Center for American Progress (2023). 10 ways the Trump administration has failed rural America (and 10 ways to overcome it). The Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/10-ways-trump-administration-failed-rural-america-10-ways-overcome/

Clark, S., Harper, S., & Weber, B. (2022). Growing Up in Rural America. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 8(4), 1-47.

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Crumb, L., Haskins, N., & Brown, S. (2019). Integrating social justice advocacy into mental health counseling in rural, impoverished American communities. Professional Counselor, 9(1), 20-34.

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Dr. Crystal Renée Chambers, J.D., Ph.D. is the 2023 Barbara Townsend Distinguished Lecturer (Association for the Study of Higher Education, Council for the Advancement of Higher Education Programs) and Professor of Educational Leadership at East Carolina University (ECU) where she examines matters of race and gender equity in higher education, particularly the areas of college choice and faculty advancement.

Dr. Loni Crumb is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor and Associate Professor in the Counselor Education Program at East Carolina University (ECU). She has authored multiple scholarly publications related to counseling and wellness and holistic student development. Her research interests include counseling in rural areas, rural education, and promoting the retention and persistence of underserved students in higher education.

Together they published African American rural education: College transitions and Postsecondary experiences (Emerald Press, 2020). Here, they note the conflation of rurality with whiteness and blackness with urbanicity. Through dismantling these stereotypical framings of rural college students, Chambers and Crumb seek to understand the challenges, trajectories, and opportunities for rural students through demographic disaggregation so as to inform student recruitment and persistence, as well as institutional retention efforts in a culturally responsive manner. In “Rural cultural wealth: Dismantling deficit ideologies of rurality” (Journal of Multicultural Education, 2022) with co-authors Amy Azano (Virginia Tech), Africa Hands (University of Buffalo), Kristen Cuthrell (ECU), and Max Avent (Community Organizer) they put forward a conceptual model of Rural Cultural Wealth (RCW) which posits rural resourcefulness, ingenuity, familism, and unity as assets rural communities tend to possess — assets that can be leveraged to improve educational and well-being outcomes for individuals families, and communities. They’ve recently extended this model (with Victor Ihuka, ECU) to the Nigerian context demonstrating the applicability of the RCW framework internationally (International Education Research, 2024).

Institutional Context: East Carolina University (ECU) is a rural-serving public regional doctoral institution whose engagement is centered on the 29 counties in North Carolina situated east of Interstate 95. ECU is recognized with the elective community engagement Carnegie Classification. That classification supports the ECU motto, Servire, which means to serve.

Snapshot Institutional Profile* (for comparative purposes as part of the broader project described below):

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This entry is part of a Public Writing Project, Higher Education for the World We Need, co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman. Initial reflections in that writing project will be posted here, on the blog of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative). The Collaborative is a multi-institutional community of practice, network, and movement hosted in the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. The Collaborative advances ethical, critical, aspirationally decolonial community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities.

Join us for the next Collaborative Summit, Collaboration for a Better World: Global Learning, Hope, and Justice, from November 8-10, 2024, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA.