A research group released a new report Monday detailing metrics for determining a college's rurality beyond where it's located. It identified more than 1,000 such institutions using its new criteria.
The Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges said a barrier to helping rural-serving institutions is that they've never been clearly defined. Often these colleges are thought of as being in sparsely populated places. But an institution could be located on the edge of a suburban county but draw students from nearby rural areas, according to Kevin McClure, the group's communications director and a higher ed professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
