Imagine you’re a prospective college student in small-town or rural America looking to earn a degree at an institution you could likely get into and afford, weighing commute times from home. Or perhaps you’re a lawmaker trying to understand which colleges and universities best serve constituents in the less populated reaches of your state or district.
You check out the college rankings in publications like U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, Money Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal, and quickly realize you’re out of luck. None of these outlets specifically rank schools in rural America. So, you Google “best rural colleges.” Here, you find some online sites that do rank such schools. But these serve you up lists of elite colleges like Dartmouth or Middlebury that, while located in bucolic settings, overwhelmingly admit upper-middle-class urban and suburban students with above-perfect GPAs.
Congratulations. You have just encountered example number 179 of how rural people get screwed in contemporary America. For decades, nonmetro areas have been losing population, jobs, schools, hospitals, banks, grocery stores, and news outlets. Every four years, national media descends on rural voters, staging interviews in diners to determine why exactly rural constituents feel left behind. Meanwhile, state and federal lawmakers keep on setting policy that neglects their needs.
Higher education is one of those needs. Today, there’s a set of colleges and universities powering upward mobility in rural America. These schools are load-bearing pillars of local tax bases, essential infrastructure for rural communities, and anchors of civic life. They are often their regions’ largest employers or host the only museum in their county. Some serve as their communities’ law enforcement or power company.
And these universities are getting shafted, too, right along with their communities. State legislatures routinely send more tax dollars per student to their flagship universities, which mostly recruit from affluent metro areas and out of state, than to regional public universities that serve working-class and rural students living nearby. And a disproportionate number of the colleges that have closed their doors in recent years, or are predicted to over the next decade, are nonselective liberal arts schools in small towns that serve the same nonwealthy demographic (see Richard Greenwald, “After the Closures”). As two-thirds of U.S. college students attend schools within 25 miles of home, the loss of these schools pushes college attendance further out of reach for rural students.
For all these reasons, the Washington Monthly this year is debuting a new ranking: “Best Colleges for Rural America.” To get on the list, colleges must be located in rural areas and not be highly selective in their admissions policies. To do well on the list, they need to recruit and graduate large numbers of in-state students of modest means with degrees that earn higher salaries than would be predicted given the students’ demographics. Colleges get extra credit if they grant large numbers of degrees in fields that are in high demand but low supply in rural areas—like teaching, nursing, engineering, agriculture, and natural resources management—and if their graduates stay in the state rather than taking their skills, and the tax dollars that paid for them, elsewhere.
For decades, nonmetro areas have been losing population, jobs, schools, hospitals, banks, grocery stores, and news outlets. Every four years, national media descends on rural voters to determine why exactly rural constituents feel left behind. Meanwhile, lawmakers keep on setting policy that neglects their needs.
The first thing you’ll notice when you look at the ranking is that these are not colleges most people have heard of. Only in their states and regions are they well known, and typically beloved.
Case in point is the number one college on our list, the University of West Alabama. Located in the town of Livingston (pop. 3,436), in the heart of Alabama’s rural Black Belt region, UWA was founded—like many institutions on this list—as a teacher’s college. Churning out educators remains central to its mission. In 2024, more than a quarter of UWA’s undergraduates and more than three-quarters of its master’s students finished with an education credential in a region plagued by teacher shortages. UWA’s College of Education also provides scholarships up to $10,000 for students committed to teaching in public schools and hosts a Center for Reimagining Rural Education. In total, 65 percent of West Alabama students graduate with degrees in education or other fields that are in short supply in rural areas, winning the university the top spot in that category of our ranking. It is also number one in another important metric: earnings performance. Four years after graduation, UWA students enjoy a median income of $64,122, an astounding $26,561 more than they would likely have earned, considering their backgrounds, had they graduated from a typical college.
Another school that excels at boosting the earnings of its graduates is the Missouri University of Science and Technology (number 29), a public research university in Rolla, Missouri, midway between St. Louis and Springfield on Route 66. Well over half of Missouri S&T bachelor’s students study engineering, a high-demand field with an aging workforce, and 61 percent finish with in-demand rural degrees overall, earning it the number four spot in that category. Missouri S&T grads also earn $93,514 annually four years after they leave, which is $11,714 more than predicted, placing it ninth in our earnings category. The school is well known for its academic rigor and comes in eighth on The Wall Street Journal’s “Best Salaries” ranking, one notch above Carnegie Mellon University. Yet it achieves that status while admitting students who aren’t necessarily math prodigies or whose parents couldn’t pay for expensive test prep: Missouri S&T’s acceptance rate is 79 percent, versus Carnegie Mellon’s 12 percent.
Piedmont University, located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Demorest, Georgia, also shines in both alumni earnings and the degrees it grants. In a state facing nurse and teacher shortages, as most do, Piedmont’s largest undergraduate programs are nursing and education—with more than half of all bachelor’s students studying one of the two. In 2024, a whopping 92 percent of master’s students finished with an education credential, and its College of Education partners with over 40 school systems to provide enrollees internships and hands-on classroom experience. Similarly, students on the Bachelor of Science in Nursing track must complete 200 clinical hours to finish their degree, and most fulfill that requirement through local placements. Piedmont sits at number 15 on our in-demand rural degrees metric, number six on alumni incomes (with grads earning $12,469 more than predicted), and number 11 overall among rural colleges—making it one of only two private schools to crack the top 20.
But before schools can become standouts on alumni outcomes, they must first deliver on metrics that show nonwealthy students pathways to college. This means recruiting large numbers of Pell-eligible students and maintaining low net prices that allow students to graduate with minimal debt. Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, for example, earns its number seven spot by virtue of its solid performance across the board—ranking 37th in serving Pell recipients, 30th for its $9,897 net price, and 15th on the average loan debt students incur ($17,367). Northeastern also gets our extra credit for serving largely Oklahomans: 91 percent of Northeastern’s student body hails from within the state, and—given its home in the heart of the Cherokee Nation—more than 14 percent are Native American.
Rural schools overall enroll outsize shares of Native American students relative to their metropolitan compatriots. They also often serve larger percentages of first-generation or adult students, who may have less family experience with college-going or more work and caregiving responsibilities outside the classroom. For these groups, communicating with registrars, bursars, and the like—the seasonal headaches that all college students endure—can be especially daunting.
“Going through the [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] for the first time, I had no clue what to put on it,” says Trey Jarboe, executive vice president for student experience at the University of the Cumberlands (number four), a private school in Williamsburg, Kentucky. “I remember walking up to financial aid every year and being like ‘Hey, can you help me?’” Help him they did, and Jarboe—a Williamsburg local, whose logger father was set on his kids being the first in the family to attend college—went on to receive his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees from Cumberlands. (His story is no outlier: 31 percent of Cumberlands students are first generation.)
Strong student services are essential for those colleges that seek to do right by rural students, who, despite graduating high school at rates above the national average, are still less likely to attend college or, when they do, more likely to drop out. Cal Poly Humboldt (number eight), a state school nestled among the redwoods of Arcata, California, boasts the highest graduation rate among our top 10. It pairs incoming students with a “support trio”: a peer mentor, a faculty adviser, and a second adviser to help navigate day-to-day campus life. Cumberlands, which boasts the third-highest graduation rate among our top 10, assigns each student—be they in-person or in one of its booming online bachelor’s programs—a success coordinator, who serves as a liaison to the university at large. “There are seasons in your life that you need your hand held,” Jarboe told me. “We are here to be hand-holders.”
From the top of these rankings on down, there’s a final aspect shared among the Best Colleges for Rural America: These schools offer a solution to rural communities’ chicken-and-egg, jobs-and-talent problem. They give talented youth a way to stay local and make a decent living, and they show incoming industry that local talent is on offer. As Charles Welch, the president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, told me, there is one question that relocating companies typically ask: “Can you provide an educated and trained workforce for us?” Universities allow rural leaders to answer affirmatively.
In a sane world, political leaders who say they care about rural America would be doing everything they can to boost its economy. They would, for instance, provide high-speed broadband so small-town businesses can compete with those in metro areas. They would crack down on agricultural and other corporate monopolies that are sucking rural communities dry—the strategy that succeeded in reversing rural America’s decline a century ago. And, at the very least, elected officials would be putting more money into regional public universities, which the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research has shown provide a far greater economic return on state dollars than corporate tax and other subsidies.
Instead, rural colleges are being left to fall into a self-reinforcing cycle of distress, with declining admissions leading to shrinking tuition revenue followed by downsizing: cutting majors, combining programs, and laying off faculty and staff.
This is happening at even the best rural institutions. Emporia State University, a regional public university on the plains of Kansas, earns number 19 on the Washington Monthly’s rural college rankings on the strength of excellent earnings and modest debt for its students. But in 2022, after years of budget shortfalls, it cut, merged, or downgraded 40 courses of study and fired 30 tenured or tenure-track faculty members. Administrators said the actions were necessary to close the deficit, and that restructuring decisions were driven by programs’ popularity with students. But many of the cuts came in humanities courses that experts say provide precisely the kind of critical-thinking skills students will need to thrive in workplaces increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence.
These schools offer a solution to rural communities’ chicken-and-egg, jobs-and-talent problem. They give talented youth a way to stay local and make a decent living, and they show incoming industry that local talent is on offer.
Rural colleges are already “very lean, very efficient institutions,” Cecilia Orphan, founding codirector of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, told me. “There’s no fat to cut.” So, administrators are slicing into meat—not just academics but also support services, like career counseling, that working-class students especially need.
It’s possible to save America’s rural colleges from this doom loop, if federal leaders are willing to try a bold plan—one Kevin Carey, director of education policy at the think tank New America, details in this issue. Under this plan, Washington would offer to pay colleges a fixed amount—say, $10,000, the average cost to educate a college student today—for every enrolled student. In return, colleges that take the money would be obliged to charge low or no tuition to students of modest means, accept all transfer credits from all other colleges that participate in the system, and work with researchers to improve teaching methods. Elite colleges that cater to the affluent would see this as a bad deal economically for them and refuse to participate. That’s fine, because the program wouldn’t be mandatory. But for other colleges, especially rural ones, it would be a lifeline—a way to keep their doors open permanently while offering a better quality and far more affordable education to their students.
We hope the logic of this idea will appeal to a future national leader who understands, as most voters do, that the current higher education system is broken. Until then, we hope our new Best Colleges for Rural America can help make the case that the system is worth fixing.
METHODOLOGY
To compile the Best Colleges for Rural America ranking, we began with a list of more than 1,000 rurally located schools identified by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges (AARC)’s Rural-Serving Post-Secondary Institutions project. To keep the focus on four-year nonprofit colleges and universities, we filtered out for-profit and two-year schools. We also excluded rurally located schools that are highly selective—those with acceptance rates under 75 percent—because they tend to admit few students from rural communities. We then ranked the remaining 225 institutions on the Washington Monthly’s social mobility metrics. These include the percent of a college’s students on Pell Grants; the annual net price students from median-income and below families pay; median student loan debt; and the earnings of their alumni.
To reward colleges that return state taxpayer investments by training and retaining talent in their states, we added two additional metrics. One is the percentage of a college’s students recruited from inside the state, using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). The other is the percentage of a college’s alumni who stay in the state (using data from the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research’s Grads on the Go project). Finally, using IPEDS data, we gave extra points to colleges that graduate students in fields that are in demand in rural areas but in short supply.
The degrees we included in this metric fall into the following categories, defined by the National Center for Education Statistics Classification of Instructional Programs: Agriculture, Agriculture Operations, and Related Sciences; Natural Resources and Conservation; Parks, Recreation, and Leisure; Engineering; Health Professions and Related Clinical Sciences; Public Administration and Social Service Professions; and Education.
DEFINITIONS
The first column ranks the percent of students who receive a Pell Grant, and the second column shows the rank. The third column shows the percent of in-state students, and the fourth column shows the rank. The fifth column shows the percent of alumni who stay in the state the school is located in after graduation, and the sixth column shows the rank. The seventh and eighth columns show what graduates are predicted to earn four years after graduation and what alumni actually earn on average annually four years after graduation—adjusted for the average rent in the county a school is located in—and the ninth column shows the earnings performance rank. The 10th column shows the net price, or the annual amount students pay when factoring in aid, and the 11th column shows the rank. The 12th column shows the average student loan debt graduates incur, and the 13th column shows the rank. The 14th column shows the percent of students who graduate with degrees in high demand in rural areas, and the 15th column shows the rank.
