Fewer roads to college: The rural Midwest’s educational disadvantage

We are often told that smaller classes foster a more personalized education, but what happens when “small” is not an intentional pedagogical choice but the only option — year after year, with the same eleven faces in the classroom? 

At my public high school in Armour, S.D., which enrolled roughly fifty students in total, intimacy came at the expense of opportunity. Many rural schools simply do not have the funds to provide higher-quality education, thus limiting the educational opportunities that most would consider to be core knowledge. 

A 2018 report from the National School Boards Association stated that inadequate funding is a significant barrier for rural schools and that “on average, rural districts receive just 17% of state education funding.”

In disadvantaged schools like mine, advanced placement courses were nonexistent. Students could not progress beyond Algebra II, nor were we offered courses in chemistry, physics, pre-calculus, or economics. 

Extracurriculars that nurture curiosity and skill — academic clubs, debate, journalism, robotics — were equally absent. This scarcity did not strike me as unusual at the time; after all, the nearest high schools looked no different. Without a model of what education could be, how could we recognize what was missing?

The realization came only after graduation when I began my college career. Despite leaving high school with a strong GPA, it immediately felt diminished in comparison to what the majority of my peers had already accomplished academically. It became clear how far behind I was compared to peers who had been prepared with a broader curriculum and richer resources. 

While they drew upon prior exposure to advanced coursework and extracurricular enrichment, I was left playing an exhausting game of catch-up. The structural deficiencies of my education were no reflection of my ambition, but they shaped the foundation upon which my ambitions were built.

This is not an isolated story. The majority of South Dakota is composed of rural towns like my own, yet the issue of underfunded rural education remains rarely discussed, let alone seriously addressed. Recent federal decisions have only deepened the problem. 

For instance, the Trump administration recently moved to withhold $6.8 billion in school funding across South Dakota, which will affect critical programs such as Title II-A (educator training and recruitment), Title III-A (support for English learners), Title IV-A (student enrichment and after-school programs), migrant education and adult education grants.

These programs are lifelines for already vulnerable schools, and yet they are treated as expendable. This is an issue that should be known and addressed by all. 

Growing up in this environment has left me with a sense of shame — a quiet embarrassment about the education I received and the gaps it left behind. But this shame should not belong to me, nor to any student who comes from a rural community. 

It belongs to a system that has consistently failed to value our potential. Every child deserves an education that equips them not just to survive in the world beyond their hometown but to thrive in it. The question is not whether students from small towns can rise to the occasion but whether our nation is willing to invest in their chance to do so. 

Awareness is the first step toward equity in education. By confronting the disparities that rural students face, we can begin to challenge the complacency that allows them to persist. My story is only one among many, but it speaks to a larger truth: when we neglect rural education, we do not simply underfund schools — we undercut futures.