Stanford Politics

Aside from prevailing as one of the few universities to have an official glossary for campus lingo (just for those giddy pro-fros and weary mid-winter tourists), Stanford may be the only American university to dub itself “The Farm.”

Why is this tag touted by the administration, you may ask? Well, aside from the current campus lying on the founders’ former stock farm, and the presence of small research acreage that resembles something of a neighborhood garden from Southern Living, the answer is dubious at best.

As a student who hails from rural, south-central Nebraska, I’ve spent my first year-and-a-half here trying to answer that question myself. But time and time again, I find the university’s current engagement efforts with rural students to be at odds with its self-proclaimed moniker.

Let us first consider this: as a demographic, rural students compose 4-5 percent of the Stanford undergraduate student body (according to a faculty familiar with the matter). For some, this may seem reasonable, especially considering patterns of self-selection and admission biases that plague certain rural applicants to elite, private universities. (For instance, study found applicants who cited leadership positions in community and agricultural youth organizations (e.g. 4-H, FFA, ROTC) had up to 65 percent lower odds of admission to a some selective schools.)

But, on the whole, rural individuals account for 19.3 percent of the US population – amplifying Stanford’s nearly four-to-five-fold deficit in rural representation. This then begs this question: why does this matter?

The self-evident reasons are plenty.

For starters, growing up in a rural setting practically guarantees exposure to a very different set of career fields and life opportunities than can be found in larger cities. Not only does this translate to unique summer job placements for youth (like detasseling instead of, say, research at a local college), but it also provides rural students with a significantly different framework for thinking about the implications of public policy than those who grow up in coastal economies centered around tech and finance.

Indeed, some students already recognize this factor. Gabrielle Torrance, a junior co-leading an alternative spring break (ASB) trip to Illinois this March to raise awareness for the roles that private universities can play in engagement with rural areas, says, “Hearing from students whose parents are employed in [rural]industries…is valuable to aspiring policymakers or anyone else interested in the future of the country’s economy.”

But the significance of a rural perspective at a place like Stanford is not purely dependent on the socioeconomic stature of family members and friends. Nor does it lie in the more abstract lore of 200-person towns, “bring-your-tractor-to-school days,” and camaraderie at community potlucks.

Indeed, grave social and economic disparities are very real in today’s rural regions, which further embody the rural-urban divide. Shortages of doctors and medical staff, significant levels of poverty, poorer health outcomes and the logistical challenges of coordinating care facilities within a geographically dispersed population generate health care challenges far different than those undertaken in urban areas.

In recent decades, rural education systems have been forced to grapple with higher relative poverty rates, staffing shortages (especially in STEM fields) and the necessary redirection of funds for student transportation, which can adversely affect learning outcomes.

Furthermore, despite rural students having higher high school graduation rates, fewer of them matriculate and ultimately earn a college degree as compared to their metropolitan peers (not to mention the lack of access to college preparatory opportunities, which is magnified by the practical absence of rural school choice among other factors).  

However, the rural experience extends beyond the aforementioned socioeconomic trends and inequalities in healthcare and education. It encompasses the deficiencies of rural infrastructure; it embodies the technological disparities of broadband, smartphone and computer access. And arguably, it’s most nuanced on the sociopolitical front, where rural areas are often portrayed as either “morally indefensible,” “disenfranchised” communities or conjured up as the picturesque, Main Street U.S.A towns where everyone greets each other with a handshake and a smile. As a result, the perspective rural students are endowed with draws its significance from this complex and multifaceted web of stereotypes, policy dilemmas and cultural dynamics at play in the non-urban reality.

And in today’s grand scheme of college admissions, realities like this have begun to matter more and more. Indeed, selective universities now espouse diversity as a cornerstone of the undergraduate experience, citing their abilities to generate culturally rich and vibrant community, foster a robust exchange of ideas and provide an environment in which students can actively engage with current events and “deeper societal questions.”  

But, we can’t (and shouldn’t) shy away from this topic with a naive eye. Indeed, while such efforts have helped many minority demographics gain ground in the student body profile, select demographics still lag. For example, black enrollment at several elite universities has stagnated, and in some cases, declined, since the 1990s. The New York Times’ database on socioeconomic diversity demonstrates that several selective universities are predominantly composed of students who originate from the top two quintiles of American wealth. And on the geographical front, students of rural origin are no exception to the ongoing phenomenon.

“Under-representation of rural students is a concern across higher education in general and a concern that we at Stanford are increasingly working to address…it is our hope that our applicant pool increasingly reflects the geographic diversity of the national and global population,” confirmed Eliza Powers, the Stanford undergraduate admissions officer for several midwestern states.

So, the grand question: what is being done?

In recent years, universities across the nation have proactively enacted policies that incentivize and attach substantial value to applications from rural regions of the United States. Princeton expanded its ROTC and community college transfer programs in 2017, which the WSJ cites as disproportionately aiding rural applicants in the admissions process. In recent years, schools like Duke and the University of California – Berkeley have helped train advisors with the College Advising Corps, whose mission is to enroll more demographically underrepresented youth in higher education (including students from rural areas). And perhaps most notably, in 2017, Swarthmore commenced program dubbed Small Towns at Swarthmore, which sends targeted mailings to rural prospects, along with an invitation for school counselors to nominate students for an all-expenses-paid visit to the eastern Pennsylvania college.

But here in Palo Alto, the situation isn’t as sunny as one might expect. Earlier this month, our undergraduate office of admissions was kind enough to inform me of its practices for recruiting rural students, which are centered around mailings (both through digital sources and booklets via US mail), as well as video conferencing with small groups.

I, along with other rural students, genuinely appreciate these efforts and no doubt understand the glaring logistical challenges of reaching rural applicants. After all, it’s difficult to justify sending one counselor on a four-hour round trip through corn country to a high school where only one student may choose to ultimately apply.

“Stanford did not recruit to me, it recruited to a city about 60 miles away, but no one from my town has gone to Stanford (before me), so why would they spend time going to a town of 1,200 where they’ll have no applicants?” emphasized Johnathan Bridges, a current sophomore from the Northern Tennessee town of Huntsville (Population: 1,248).

Nevertheless, as a rural applicant, I found the Stanford process stifling. It felt as though I was wandering in the dark with no sense of direction, clinging to the generic online portals viewed by 40,000 other applicants, no indication of admissions officer visits within a 100-mile radius of my home, no possibility of becoming enlightened from the perspective of a current student (because there were none in my immediate area), and upon admission, no alumni-orchestrated meetups or receptions within the entire state (a practice that any Stanford student knows is ubiquitous to significant urban areas).

So, in the end, from Common App ‘opening day’ to my notification of admission, the only real source of information I had available to me was a single interview with an alumni and a booklet that arrived just days before the submission of my application.

However, this practice doesn’t have to linger as a misguided status quo and ingrain itself in the minds of future matriculants. For starters, Stanford could implement an online information platform tailored to rural applicants (an idea supported by Bridges) or incorporate admissions officer visits to centralized locations in rural regions, so students from multiple school districts can take advantage of the opportunity to learn about Stanford in a time-efficient and cost-conscious manner. An alternative initiative, suggested by Torrance, could be one in which prospective rural applicants are connected with current undergraduates (preferably who originate from rural areas) so that they can gauge the first-hand experience of those who live the Stanford life 30 weeks of the year.

Another point of contention worthy of clarification to rural students interested in “The Farm” is the holistic admissions process and generous financial aid programs posed by Stanford. Speaking from experience, many rural prospects dismiss aspirations of applying to selective universities because of the historically ingrained (albeit stereotypical and exaggerated) image of a “4.5 GPA, 36 ACT” admit who grew up in the shadows of Wall Street, sauntering on the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard. In reality though, universities like Stanford value far more than the numbers behind face or a family’s aristocratic origins, and offer generous financial aid packages that rival those of in-state universities.

Hence, in the coming admissions cycles, I am eager to witness how Stanford takes initiative on the rural front and capitalizes on its plentiful resources to reach well-deserving students in what many dismiss as the ‘fly-over’ regions of our country. After all, if the admissions office is serious about its mission to promote the triad of academic excellence, intellectual vitality and, most relevant to our concerns here, personal context, it needs to think more critically about the perspectives of students from one traffic light towns – the ones who grow up surrounded by more cattle than people, the ones who never know how far away help is when they dial 911, the ones who recognize every single face strolling the sidewalks of their town, the ones who don’t simply walk two miles down the road to their “next door neighbor.”

If this perspective was more widely understood and present here at Stanford, then maybe we could pride ourselves on being “The Farm.”

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Thomas Pfeiffer is a sophomore studying economics.