Who Are Rural Learners? Their Community Context Matters
The Who Are Rural Learners series
Learners in rural areas are seeking what every learner seeks: education and training pathways to good, family-sustaining jobs. Ensuring that rural learners find and complete such pathways requires building on the assets and addressing the challenges distinct to rural areas. In our three-part Who Are Rural Learners series, we’ll highlight promising models of postsecondary education and workforce training that do both.
At the same time, the smaller scale of rural communities may translate to significant strengths and assets that can support learners’ success. Rural colleges’ small size may enable them to be more nimble in responding to shifting community needs, for example. Our rural college partners often share that the relationships in their tight-knit communities facilitate trusting partnerships with nonprofit organizations and other support services that can quickly respond to learners’ needs, ensuring they don’t fall through the cracks. These relationships matter, especially for learners from low-income backgrounds. Many larger colleges strive to find ways to provide the level of support and outreach many smaller rural colleges can provide their learners at scale.
Additionally, wide variation in rural contexts — such as historic industries, population density, and the strength of local infrastructure like broadband access — underscores how important self-determining solutions are when creating educational and workforce development initiatives. Indeed, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Even as institutions, education and workforce intermediaries, and funders like Ascendium are working to identify and scale promising approaches for creating new opportunities in rural areas, local adaptation and variation will be critical to learners’ success.
Rural-Centered Approaches to Building Postsecondary Education and Workforce Training Pathways
Across Ascendium’s rural-serving grant partners, there are numerous examples of postsecondary education and workforce training initiatives that are tailored to both leverage the assets and address the challenges of particular rural communities.
Good Jobs Hawai’i
For a largely rural and geographically isolated state like Hawai’i, education and training programs need to meet learners where they are and offer hyperlocal education pathways that are responsive to specific employer needs. By forging partnerships between two- and four-year institutions in the University of Hawai’i system, employers, and local organizations, Good Jobs Hawai’i is helping local residents find an accelerated path to in-demand sectors like healthcare, technology, clean energy, and the skilled trades. Their home-grown approach allows them to identify discrete, highly specific solutions to local economic needs while connecting learners to good jobs in their areas. Learners in Hawai’i can take a course to either join the workforce in a new role or earn a new certification and a higher wage with a current employer. As an example of the latter, three learners working at Moloka’i Drugs received free onsite training to earn their national certification as pharmacy technicians (Source: University of Hawai’i News). This is all possible thanks to the partnership and investment of the University System, which prioritized the needs of its rural learners when designing the initiative.
Goodwill Industries International and the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE)
Recognizing that the number of postsecondary institutions and workforce training organizations is often more limited in rural communities, Ascendium’s grantmaking strategy has focused on identifying organizations that have an established presence in rural areas and can play a critical role in connecting key partners in the local workforce and employment ecosystem. Goodwill Industries International and the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE) are two such organizations creating pathways to opportunity in rural areas. Goodwill centers in eight rural communities are using the Opportunity Accelerator model to develop new training pathways aligned to labor market needs in their regions, providing low-income young adults with training and support to attain jobs that pay a living wage. Similarly, ACCE is centering chambers of commerce as key conveners in rural communities. By leveraging the connections chambers have with employers and postsecondary institutions, ACCE is helping 12 rural chambers take a lead role in providing learners and workers from low-income backgrounds with the training needed to access well-paying, high-demand jobs in their areas.
National Center for Inquiry and Improvement’s (NCII) Rural Guided Pathways Project
Rural institutions are often serving large service areas and may not have the funding or bandwidth to gather, analyze, and use critical labor market data to inform their understanding of learners’ needs and create structural supports. This is why the National Center for Inquiry and Improvement’s (NCII) Rural Guided Pathways Project is helping rural colleges across the country build their capacity to implement evidence-based, institution-wide reforms in their regions. With the goal of improving completion rates and ensuring programs prepare learners for local workforce needs, both now and in the future, participating college leaders are collaborating with community partners to address challenges particular to their context and capacity. For instance, Colorado Mountain College serves an area spanning 7,500 square miles and is composed of 11 campuses. NCII is working with them to understand the labor market needs of their region and support their implementation of reforms across multiple campuses.
The Community Colleges of Appalachia’s (CCA) Rural Educator Academy
In the 205,000-square-mile Appalachian region, 42% of which is rural, the Community Colleges of Appalachia (CCA) supports its 86 member institutions in addressing shared cultural, geographic, and economic development challenges. Their Rural Educator Academy sought to improve rural learner outcomes by building the capacity of rural community colleges’ faculty and staff to understand and respond to rural learner needs. Creating a sense of belonging on campus is one of those needs. As a result of the Rural Educator Academy’s training, nearly all participants reported greater understanding of their learners’ needs and an improved, and more learner-centered, campus culture.
In the next article for the Who Are Rural Learners series, we’ll continue thinking about the importance of leveraging the assets of rural learners’ communities to build strong workforce training pathways. We’ll ask: How are rural communities uniquely positioned to lead the way in emerging industries, especially if they build accessible and affordable pathways to those industries?
