As many as 41 million Americans live in "higher education deserts" -- at least half an hour's drive from the nearest college or university and with limited access to community college. Many of these deserts are in rural America, which is one reason so much of rural America is less prosperous than it deserves to be. The lack of higher…

In this descriptive and comparative study, we present results highlighting the complexity and scope of the challenges facing rural districts as they navigate the changing demographics of the students and families they serve. Rapid increases in the number and concentration of racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students in rural areas…

Many reports on rural education give little attention to digital learning. At most, they tend to note either infrastructure needs or the potential of remote course access, with little focus on instruction, outcomes, or exemplars. This report intends to begin correcting that imbalance by connecting the dots between rural regions, rural education,…

High-poverty schools in rural areas and small towns are under attack from state policy makers who want to consolidate these schools in order to save money. In addition to calls for consolidation, rural schools also are threatened by unfair and inadequate funding formulas.

This study is designed to include four waves of data collection, conducted approximately every other year, beginning in 2004 and continuing through 2011. This report briefly describes the procedures used for the third wave of data collection, completed in 2008-2009, and the results from a sample of Pennsylvania's rural 11th grade youth and youth…

Educational leadership has been the focus of many studies; however, leadership does not occur in a vacuum. Understanding the context in which it occurs will in turn help to explain the phenomenon itself. Rural communities in the United States have many differences when compared to urban and suburban areas. Twenty-eight percent of schools in the…

In 2004, the Center for Rural Pennsylvania contracted with Pennsylvania State University to begin a longitudinal study of rural Pennsylvania school students to understand their educational and career aspirations and the factors influencing their aspirations, whether their plans change as they age and if they attain their goals. In its entirety,…

The purpose of this research is to compare the rural education practices of China, Taiwan, Canada and the United States. International comparisons of mathematics achievement find that students in Asian countries outperform those from the USA. Excluded from these studies, however, are students from rural areas in China. This study compares the math…

Women farmers are underserved in agricultural education and technical assistance. Long held social constructions of farming women as "farmwives" and in some cases "the bookkeepers" rather than farmers or decision-makers influence the direction of most educational programming delivered through extension programs in land-grant…

The purpose of this research was to describe the status of and factors that influence adult learning and to provide information to help policymakers foster adult learning programs in rural Pennsylvania face a unique set of challenges and obstacles. These include serving a diverse group of rural adults who need a variety of services, a changing job…

An exploratory analysis of the meanings families attach to schooling, this article is based upon interviews conducted with three white, middle-class families--one from rural West Virginia, another from a small West Virginia city, and a third from rural Pennsylvania. I hoped that this preliminary effort would help me think about how families view…

Describes a two-year nursing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford (Pennsylvania) that was developed 15 years ago to address the critical shortage of trained nurses in rural northern Pennsylvania. To date, the program has graduated 269 students, of which approximately 75% have taken jobs within the region. (LP)

According to U.S. Census data, in rural Pennsylvania, 37% of adults did not complete higher school, and 21% did not go beyond 8th grade. As a consequence of present demographic and literacy trends, the proportion of the workforce with low levels of basic skills is growing. At the same time, a changing labor market is creating new jobs that demand…

Despite skepticism about the viability of an educational investment strategy for rural development, coordination between education and rural employers may be a key to rural economic growth. Interviews with 101 employers in 6 rural counties surrounding Hagerstown, Maryland, as well as a mail survey (95 of the 101 employers responded), examined…

This report presents the problems of rural Pennsylvania and proposes solutions to those problems. Because the news media does not systematically report on rural situations, the public lacks awareness concerning the problems in rural Pennsylvania. Rural problems include high unemployment rates, high welfare expenditures, out migration, low…