In rural areas of the United States, 36% of work costs are enough to make individuals self-sufficient in need of at least a bachelor’s degree, but only 25% of rural workers have such a degree. Many rural communities do not have colleges or four-year colleges nearby. As a result, students in these communities will likely start their bachelor’s degree at community colleges. More than a quarter of nearly 1,000 community colleges nationwide are in rural areas, and many other areas are designated as rural services.
The path for rural students to earn a bachelor’s degree is not as simple as those in urban or suburban students with a higher concentration of four-year institutions. For students at rural community colleges, there are four main pathways to earn a bachelor’s degree. As mentioned below, the first three, more conventional paths are not always good. But there is a fourth road – the community college bachelor’s degree program. Although still relatively rare, this path is becoming more and more popular because, when well designed, it effectively enables land-occupying students to earn a bachelor’s degree and get good jobs in the community.
Path 1: Transfer to a four-year university
The first path is to move to a four-year university, either becoming a residential student or commuting to and from get off work to get back and forth from school at home. Laramie County Community College is one of us presidents who has worked with the University of Wyoming, a state university in Laramie, to develop a guaranteed pathway to major economic areas of economic importance to the region and the state.
However, only a few LCCC students (mostly young students receive financial support from their families) can actually afford to become full-time residential students at UW. Most community college students have jobs and families, and they can’t leave for months each year, even if they can afford rooms and boards (less capable) in addition to tuition. Even for LCCC students living in relatively nearby Cheyenne, it is difficult to get to get off work from UW, nearly an hour from Laramie on a road that crosses the highest point of the continental divide and is often closed in winter. Getting to and from get off work is unrealistic for LCCC students who live in remote areas and other Wyoming community colleges.
Path 2: Get a bachelor’s degree online
In theory, this should be an effective choice for college students in rural areas and land-occupying communities. In fact, this path is not feasible for many rural students living in the “digital desert” or facing the “last mile” barrier to broadband access.
Even if Internet access is not a problem, many students have difficulty completing online courses. Only one in four community college students who transfer to online colleges completed their bachelor’s degree within four years of transfer. By comparison, 57% of community college starters moved to public four-year institutions. Overall, undergraduates in all courses online are less likely to succeed than those that only take some online courses. For low-income students, other underserved groups or those typically faced with other challenges in rural areas, such as limited transportation and childcare services, online success rates are particularly low.
Path 3: Complete a bachelor’s degree through a community college-based university center
The third way is to allow students to participate in the superior courses through the university center, and the four-year university has a physical state on the community university campus. These arrangements are designed to vary but often involve university teaching courses on community college campuses. While conceptually reasonable, university centers are often challenging. In addition to the common problems of ownership, supervision and authority related to programs carried out by two independent institutions, such programs often do not have enough students to make the university worth investing, so it is difficult to maintain economically and politically.
Road 4: Bachelor’s Degree in Community College
This makes community college bachelor’s degree programs usually the best choice for rural students. Research shows that these programs can not only provide effective bachelor’s degree programs for older students with families and other restricted students, but also enable these students to ensure excellent work.
Some questions are whether community colleges should offer bachelor’s degrees, and believe they copy the university’s products and represent a task creep. But a bachelor’s degree in a community college is often different from a traditional bachelor’s degree in a university. First, they are explicitly designed as applicable credentials to meet specific regional labor needs. In the best case scenario, a community college bachelor’s degree is reverse engineered with employers to meet these needs.
Second, they are also often designed to help many community college graduates with applied bachelor’s degrees find more effective ways to complete a bachelor’s degree, where their applied courses are built on the foundation rather than being overlooked. Finally, they give birth at home so that graduates from community colleges tied to locally can be promoted to work with family support. They are offered through institutions that most students are already familiar with and those who already have relationships with the students.
For example, LCCC offers a bachelor’s degree in applied science in healthcare management and offers an eight-week accelerated course at convenient times and through a combination of online and in-person means. The program is designed to provide an associate degree in applied degrees to many working healthcare clinicians (e.g., nurses, sonicators, radiology technicians, etc.). The program is developed in partnership with a number of healthcare employers to address the strong demand for talent in healthcare management and provide employees with viable bachelor’s degree avenues without them starting over or moving to another community.
The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded by community colleges nationwide remains small: less than 17,000 per year, while public universities still have less than 17,000 bachelor’s degrees awarded. Still, policy makers in more states recognize that rural community colleges are in good shape to meet the needs of students and employers for a bachelor’s degree program in the workforce. Currently, community colleges in 24 states are authorized to offer bachelor’s degrees in a specific field, but most of these colleges (nearly 80%) are located in only seven states. Therefore, there is enough room for growth. The bachelor’s degree programs offered by rural community colleges provide a role model for us to hope to be a national movement to rethink the education of a bachelor’s degree to educate students who have to work and care for their families, but require a bachelor’s degree to advance to their careers.
