Breaking new ground: Diverse routes to college in rural America

Rural communities pose a challenge to status attainment models that explain children's educational attainment primarily in terms of the parents' educa tion and professional status. Alongside the rural professional class are fa rmers of similar social status but with less education and other families t hat lack the status and resources of both professional-class and farm famil ies. The prolonged agricultural crisis in the American Midwest has turned r ural youths toward college and has raised questions about the educational v alue of resources provided by farm parents and other rural parents. We clas sified youths from the Iowa Youth and Families Pr-eject into three SES grou ps: professional-managerial, farm, and lower-status. We compared these grou ps on resource levels and on the extent to which the resources predicted en rollment in a four-year college one year after high school. Findings indica ted three distinct routes to four-year college. Professional-managerial you ths tended to follow the traditional path from parents' educational and oth er resources and support to their own academic involvement and aspirations for higher education. Successful farm youths, in lieu of parental education al advantages, drew on parents' community ties. Resourceful lower-status yo uths, in the absence of family background advantages, generated educational attainment through early educational ambition and varied community and sch ool involvements. Even relatively low levels of involvement were Valuable t o these youths' educational attainment.