Giving a Voice to America’s Overlooked Students: Featured Interview from The Elective
With a hyper-focused podcast, education consultant Dr. Matt Newlin aims to change how higher ed sees rural students—and how rural students see themselves
Christian Niedan, February 10, 2023
The following is an excerpt from the full interview at The Elective:
If you go by social media, you’d think the only real college experience happens at large urban schools. But TikToks and Instagram posts of students hyping up their time on big-city campuses is a reality distortion with very real impacts—particularly for rural students considering what comes after high school.
“A sign of intent to go to college, FAFSA completions [during the covid-19 pandemic] dropped 10% nationally, 13% in rural areas, and 15% in small towns,” BestColleges.com reported in November 2021. “The largely rural states of Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and West Virginia each saw declines of at least 19%."
The article continues, "Rural students, over 70% of whom are white, are less likely to be enrolled in college than students from cities, suburbs, and towns: Just 29% of rural Americans aged 18–24 are enrolled in colleges and universities, compared to 42% of all Americans in this age range."
Dr. Matt Newlin knows those numbers all too well. And he’s exhausted with the negative narrative around non-urban schools.
Newlin is an education consultant who has served in leadership roles at Washington University in St. Louis and College Advising Corps. He’s also a doctoral advisor in the School of Business & Education at Gwynedd Mercy University.
In September 2021, Newlin launched the podcast The Rural College Student Experience to present a fuller, realer picture of the rural student experience—in higher ed, as well as K–12. The second season began in September 2022, and over the course of the podcast’s 12 episodes, Newlin has tackled topics such as "Black Students in Rural Spaces," "Native American Students in College," "Rural Broadband Access: A Panel Discussion with Lead For America Fellows," and "The Rural Identity in K–12."
To help him explore each theme, Newlin enlists a corps of student to help guide each episode’s conversation, as well as add their own insights and expertise. Those cohosts have come from schools like University of University of South Carolina Upstate, South Plains College, Dakota Wesleyan University, and Eastern Kentucky University.
The Elective recently spoke with Newlin about his podcast, the challenges facing rural college students, and what he hopes the podcast means for students grappling with their rural identity.
Tell me about the evolution of The Rural College Student Experience. How did the podcast start?
It came out of work I’d been doing the last couple of years, specifically around rural students and first-generation and low-income students. I began working with College Advising Corps, a national college access nonprofit, in 2018 as Director of Rural Initiatives. What I found very quickly was, since the 2016 election, that more and more colleges and universities were taking rural students seriously. There's more research, there are more white papers, more admissions officers are going out to rural schools. Things are happening.
But what was missing was the student voice. We weren’t getting interviews with students. We weren’t getting recommendations from students. We weren’t hearing what is unique about the rural experience that doesn’t normally fit the systems we have set up in college and university spaces. So the podcast came out of frustration a little bit, but also my interest. I thought, “Let’s get some students talking. Let’s hear from them, so that people in my space—faculty, researchers, administrators, college presidents—can hear directly from students.”
We don’t do a great job of asking students to tell their own stories. We survey them every semester, but we don’t get a lot of storytelling from them. So that was the genesis of the podcast: How can I center rural student voices so that other rural students can hear those stories, see themselves, and actually learn something? Really, it’s about getting as much out of the students as possible so we can get a real picture of what the rural student experience is.
Drawing on your professional experience and what you’ve learned doing the podcast, what is the experience of rural students today? What are some of the challenges that they face?
It's two major buckets. One is institutional barriers. It's not that rural students can't make it into college, not that they can't get there; it's that we have barriers in place that have been developed over decades and decades that are keeping the rural students out. These are things like scholarship applications that ask you for extracurriculars or about involvement with student government involvement or that look for volunteerism in a community. In a rural space, there may not be opportunities for a lot of extracurricular involvement. There may not be volunteer opportunities in the community, especially if you get into smaller and remote areas. A scholarship application that’s technically open to everyone can disadvantage rural students when it prioritizes one attribute over another. It might be a small thing, but those small things add up.
The other challenge is broader access issues of just physically getting to the campuses or having colleges come to rural spaces. One of the things you hear from rural students, administrators, counselors—everyone in this space—is college and universities are still not recruiting in rural and small towns the way they do in urban and suburban spaces. A lot of this comes down to cost, travel, distance, time, which all makes sense. But if we truly are trying to recruit students, we need to go into their communities. We need to be in their high schools, going to their games and events, and actually being a part of that community so students feel connected to the college or university. Over the last couple of decades, institutions will maybe send someone out every other year, every couple years, or they'll send information, but they're not standing there during the lunch periods doing presentations. They're not there in the evening doing FAFSA workshops.
What ties all this together is just lack of education. Colleges and universities really weren’t talking about rural students before 2016. Anyone in the space, I think, will agree with me on that. And now everyone's talking. Not everyone, obviously, but people are talking and it's really, really exciting because now we're getting to see the differing identities of rural students.
That's one of the things I make very clear on my podcast: rural spaces are incredibly diverse and incredibly intersectional. Now colleges and universities recognize that recruiting Black students, for example, in the south and Mississippi and Alabama is very different from recruiting maybe Latinx students in the southwest, which is different from getting students in Rust Belt coal mining towns. So we're finally getting colleges who are not only looking to rural students but are embracing their differences and their strengths. That's the important part, to not see rural students as deficit-laden or less than but to see the same strengths and resilience and impressive attributes that they have, same as any of their peers.
Newlin says there needs to be an "intention of carving out a new space" for Native American students on college campuses. "How do we actually speak to the needs of our Native Americans students, just like we need to do with our rural students?"
One unique facet that you focus on early in the podcast is the Native American college student experience. Your student cohost was Patience Teboe, a senior at Dakota Wesleyan University in South Dakota. Why was getting the Indigenous perspective so important to this broader conversation?
It's an area in higher ed that we don't talk about or address nearly enough. Part of the reason for that episode was my own education. As I was planning and scheduling the other guests, I realized not only do I not have any Indigenous or Native American students, but I don't know enough to carry off that conversation. I needed to learn quite a bit, and as I developed the episode and looked for the cohost and guest, I was educating myself. I was able to connect with Patience, and she was just a wonderful cohost. She was so open and honest and transparent about her experiences, challenges, what it's like.
Again, this is not my area of expertise, but I know the Indigenous population—especially those coming from reservations where there’s extreme poverty—is very under-serviced. There’s a lack of not only broadband, but sometimes electricity in spaces. And then that’s compounded with distance. Like other rural small-town students, you've got these massive distances where there aren't any colleges or universities nearby. So you've got an education desert. And then colleges and universities aren’t really speaking to the Native American experience quite yet. That's just absurd to me.
So one of the reasons I wanted to have that conversation was to reinforce the idea that rural communities are extremely diverse, extremely special, but also to say, “Hey, we need to be talking about these things in rural spaces, since that's where a lot of Native American populations are.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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