College Aspirations and Access in Working-Class Rural Communities

College Aspirations and Access in Working Class Rural Communities: The Mixed Signals, Challenges, and New Language First-Generation Students Encounter explores how a working class, rural environment influences rural students’ opportunities to pursue higher education and engage in the college choice process. Based on a case study with accounts from rural high school students and counselors, this book examines how these communities perceive higher education and what challenges arise for both rural students and counselors. The book addresses how college knowledge and university jargon illustrate the gap between rural cultural capital and higher education cultural capital. Insights about approaches to reduce barriers created by college knowledge and university jargon are shared and strategies for offering rural students pathways to learn academic language and navigate higher education are presented for both secondary and higher education institutions.

Ardoin provides an in-depth view of the current state of secondary school systems in rural communities, including especially alarming information on how this system affects the students themselves and places strain on rural high school guidance counselors. Rurality and geographic location as identifiers of underserved students are not yet common among academic literature, yet as shown, they greatly affect the ability and aspirations towards higher education of rural students. Rural students nationally will greatly benefit if readers implement the advice proposed in this book., “You don’t know what you don’t know.” This participant quote exemplifies this well-researched, engaging, and timely book about rural, first generation, and working class students and their opportunities to access college knowledge and preparation. Ardoin bares light on this under-researched population and exposes the challenges rural students and schools face in terms of bridging the rural high school-college gap. She awakens us to the revolving door system of college admissions and exposes the stratification inherent in a variety of college processes. These processes often hinder rural students success in entering and persisting at institutions of higher education. Rural, first-generation, and working class students and families don’t know what they don’t know. It is incumbent on rural schools to be a place that gathers and disseminates knowledge about college such that rural, first-generation, and working class students are as competent and competitive as their urban and suburban peers., In College Aspirations and Access in Working-Class Rural Communities, Ardoin provides a platform and creates a much needed space for discourse on the college-going experiences of rural, working-class students. Ardoin artfully moves beyond simplistic views of college access by adding complexity to the field of higher education’s collective understanding of social class. In doing so, she sheds light on what it truly means to come from a minoritized social class and a rural background.

Sonja Ardoin is program director and clinical assistant professor of higher education at Boston University.