(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Q&A: College as a First-Generation, Rural Student [1] ['Myat Theingi', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar'] Date: 2025-08-01 Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Mara Casey Tieken started out as a third-grade teacher in rural Tennessee. Today, she’s a professor of education at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Her work focuses on educational equity for rural students and communities – things like college access, school closures, and rural racial justice. Recently, she published a book called Educated Out, where she shares the stories of nine rural, first-generation students navigating life at an elite liberal arts college. In our conversation, we talked about what it’s really like for rural students in higher education, and what we can do to make sure liberal arts colleges are not only accessible to them, but also provide an experience that is meaningful and relevant to their lives. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Daily Yonder: Could you tell us a bit about why you chose to write this book and how it is structured? Mara Casey Tieken: The book is based on my research. I had been studying rural education for a while. Before I got my doctorate, I was a third-grade teacher in rural Tennessee and then went to grad school. And then after graduate school, I started teaching at Bates, which is where I still am teaching. And, basically, in May of that year, I started getting high school graduation announcements in the mail from my third graders. They were planning on becoming linemen, vet techs, and all that kind of thing, which is really good, important work. But it just struck me that very few of them were going on to get a degree. Over the next couple of years, the same pattern repeated. So this really led me to wonder why my former third graders weren’t going on to college? They were smart and really talented kids, so I knew that it wasn’t for lack of capability, right? It had to be something else. So I had that question in the back of my head. But then, after I spent a little more time at Bates, my questions expanded a bit, and I began to think, not just why weren’t they going, but what if they had gone, and what would that have been like for them? That led to this research (this book), and I followed nine rural, first-generation students from enrollment all the way through to graduation. DY: Relating to that, one of the most common misconceptions that people hold is that rural students don’t usually go to college due to a lack of aspiration. But you challenged that assumption in the book. Can you tell us more about this? MCT: In my research group, I was surprised by how much support there was for students’ college-going, and even for going to an elite school. And that’s not to say that parents didn’t have questions and qualms, and there was one parent who did not want that for his son, but by and large, this group of parents are college advocates, and a lot of it had to do with their background. They had really struggled in the different kinds of rural industries they worked in, and they didn’t want that for their child. And so, because of their own financial struggles and the limited job opportunities in many of their rural communities, they wanted their kids to be able to pursue a degree. And again, they had qualms about that, but they still really, really supported that kind of college-going for their children. DY: There’s been an increasing trend of skepticism about the value of their college degree, especially in liberal arts. How can we make liberal arts education both relevant and accessible to students in rural areas? MCT: While it certainly is harder to find a job which requires a college degree in rural areas, I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible, and particularly with more options for working remotely post-pandemic. So I think liberal arts colleges should be building more networks in rural places so that kids who do want to get a liberal arts degree and want to be able to return home can do that. And you know, some of my students either wanted or expected to need to go to a city to live after graduation. But that’s not what all of them wanted to do. And so I do think some pathways would allow a student to get a degree, then come back to their rural community and get a job. I think we need to expand those pathways and help students learn more about them, so that those who want to do so can really do so. This is not just something that educators and folks in higher education need to be thinking about. This is also an economic issue, and we need to work on creating more jobs in rural areas. We should strive to diversify rural economies in a way that’s much more sustainable in the long term, and that includes a variety of jobs and industries that require different skill levels. One thing, I think, liberal arts colleges should do well is career counseling. Because they’re coming from single-industry rural towns, many rural students don’t necessarily have the experience or the exposure to a variety of careers. As a professor at a liberal arts college, I think oftentimes we see our job as strictly academic, and you know that the whole professional piece is left to somebody else or left to the student themselves to figure it out. However, I believe faculty could do a lot more to help students truly understand how a particular discipline relates to a career, or a career path afterwards. DY: You also mentioned in the book that after college, rural students can undergo a significant transformation, both politically and ideologically, which creates a distance from their families and the town. I am wondering if it’s even a solvable problem, especially since colleges tend to be liberal, and rural areas usually tend to be conservative. MCT: These students became very skilled at boundary crossing between two different worlds. They are very good at knowing how to act, talk, and engage in different conversations at their colleges and hometowns. The other thing is that, yes, they’ve changed, but in many fundamental ways, they haven’t also. They’re still the same person they’ve always been before college, and they’re going to be negotiating cultural and ideological differences and all those sorts of things, even in their new setting. And so, you know, given the path they’ve taken, they’re always going to be kind of negotiating worlds, and I think we shouldn’t foreclose any of the options available to them, especially if they want to return to their home communities or another rural town. DY: The two criteria you set for the nine students you interviewed are rural and first-generation. But they also mostly come from low-income backgrounds. I would like to know where high-income rural students might fit in this dynamic. Will they have an impact on your findings? MCT: If these were higher-income students, I would have expected to see some variations in experience, maybe not struggling so much around that culture of wealth that my rural students encountered. But I still think that there is something specific to geography that really shapes students’ experiences. Like, if you look at the availability of guidance counselors and where elite schools will send admissions representatives, or if you look at things like regional accents, political views, or culture, like whether you own a gun or like to hunt, these things can be very place-specific and less related to class. DY: Could you also talk more about why first-gen status was important, considering there are certainly rural students who are not first-gen? MCT: We know that there is a disproportionate number of first-gen students in rural areas, so the two are linked, and that’s part of the reason that I focused on rural and first-gen students. However, some rural students are not first-gen, and I think they would probably have a different experience. But for this group of students, some things were very specific to being first-gen. For instance, while their parents very much supported them in going to college, they couldn’t offer a lot of concrete advice, such as how to fill out an application or apply for financial aid. Or the students weren’t able to talk to their parents about their academic studies, or just like kind of the nitty gritty of navigating academic structures, like parents didn’t really understand what is an academic advisor, or drop/add period or, like, any of those things that are very specific to college lingo. So, I think it contributed to that feeling of division between the students and their families, at times. But of course, students still remain close to their parents for advice, motivation, or just a refuge during their college years. This is one of those ways, as I mentioned, where students become very skilled at crossing boundaries. This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. Related Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailyyonder.com/qa-college-as-a-first-generation-rural-student/2025/08/01/ Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/