GUNNISON — Higher education lags across open expanses of the Rocky Mountain West, where distances to campuses can exceed 100 miles and, in rural Colorado, barely half of high school graduates enroll in college.
The big schools have deployed Cooper and a dozen or so other instructors to live in rural hubs and work at the partner institutions, which previously lacked accredited programs for engineering. Around the nation, unequal access to higher education in rural areas feeds into a broader imbalance where most residents of cities such as Denver hold college degrees while less than a third of rural residents hold degrees and, when they do, often must leave town to harness their skills in higher-paying jobs. A Jain Family Foundationfound access to college is worst in the Rocky Mountain region.
She’s interested in well-paid work “that can help fix the world,” she said. Looking back at her politically conservative hometown, she remembers an aversion to higher learning and economic pain from the demise of coal mining. Now, a decreasing percentage of high school graduates in rural Colorado enroll in college, a Denver Post review of state data found. The overall statewide college-going rate is about 56%, below the national average of 63% and rates above 70% in New York and other eastern states. In rural Colorado, 51.
“It is absolutely a problem when rural Coloradans, and rural Americans, don’t have easy access to higher education. It is higher educators’ job to make sure we provide that access,” Saliman said in an interview. “Getting more Coloradans to go to college is good for Colorado and is what we’re all about. If these partnerships result in more college graduates staying in Colorado, that’s even better,” he said.
CSU administrators are recruiting faculty to move to Alamosa starting in 2024, he said. “We’ll also be hiring, depending on how many of our current faculty want to take advantage of this.” The Colorado approach to boosting rural higher education began in 2008 at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, where graduates began receiving CU degrees in 2011. Since then, 194 students at CMU have earned CU degrees, including 30 last year, school officials said.
'if we don't let rural people get a college education...' Didn't realize rural folks are so helpless !
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Big universities are reaching into rural Colorado where shrinking share of high school grads go to collegePublic universities based along the urbanized Front Range – the University of Colorado and Colorado State University – are starting to offer engineering and other degrees at partner university campuses in rural hubs closest to where students live.
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