Rural College Students Step Up to Support Small-Town Peers

July 6, 2026

371

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in Mile Markers, a twice monthly newsletter from Open Campus about the role of colleges in rural America. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.

At Chico State in Northern California, paid student ambassadors have led efforts to create a stronger sense of belonging and community among rural students on campus, strengthened outreach to rural high school students in the university’s 12-county service region and researched topics related to rural student success and identity.

Veronica Ulloa (left) helps lead an interactive session at the North State Student Ambassadors’ conference for high school students. (Photo courtesy of Emily Lytle)

Kierra Alford and Isa O’Brion now both return to their home county to talk to high school students about attending a four-year university after they graduate. (Photo courtesy of Emily Lytle)

These North State Student Ambassadors even hosted two conferences for high school students. Beyond the typical campus tours, these conferences included activities that helped rural students recognize the assets of living in rural places rather than focusing on what they lacked.

Listening to five students present at NACAC’s webinar last week, I felt inspired. These students were moving the needle on the same broad issues that leaders in the industry were sharing with me — like rural students’ enrollment and persistence in college and the tension to stay or leave their rural hometowns after graduation.

I spoke with four of the student ambassadors — Veronica Ulloa, Kierra Alford, Isa O’Brion, and Nataly Garcia — about the difference that a sense of pride in your rural hometown makes and what they want decision-makers in higher ed to know about supporting rural youth. Here is one snippet of our conversation.

Emily Lytle: What difference do you think that makes having that sense of pride in where you’re from when it comes to your success as a student?

Veronica Ulloa: A lot of time within the media or just everyday discussion with people, you look at being rural as a deficit, like: “We don’t have access to wifi. We don’t have a great internet connection. It’s a food desert.” But we do a lot of work in this group about flipping the narrative. When you come from a rural area, you have different characteristics. You’re very scrappy. You have a great network of people to rely on. And even though seeing everybody at the grocery store sometimes can feel like a little much, you have a really big support system. There’s definitely a difference between a rural student and an urban student. And I think that it’s important for higher education institutions to recognize that there are good qualities of a rural student. And it also took a lot for a rural student to get to higher education.

Isa O’Brion: Also, I got to work at different places. I worked at a local deli, I’ve worked at local schools, and then I worked as a janitor my senior year. So just different opportunities and skillsets I’ve gotten from those just because maybe I knew somebody and then they were hiring. And then since we do live in a lower-income community, we have so many scholarships because I wouldn’t have been able to go to college, or at least a four-year university, my first year without that support.

Kierra Alford: When we host our conference or when we go back to speak in classrooms, it makes me really proud to be there because I was speaking to my past self in a way. These are a bunch of things that we do now that I wish we would’ve got to experience when we were in high school. So being able to do that and seeing their faces light up when someone’s talking about college from a student perspective … Being able to be that person for them is super empowering and it just makes me want to be successful.

Nataly Garcia: Having a sense of pride, just how everybody has been saying, it just gives you a stride to keep going. Just from coming from a small town, even in high school, I felt like they kind of treated us like, “Oh, well, they’re just going to end up doing a trade, or, they’re just going to end up staying here forever.”

And don’t get me wrong, maybe I do end up retiring in Los Molinos. Even just going back, it is something I see myself doing. But I think it’s always showing people that you can do it. I know there were underclassmen that would talk to me about it and be like, “Oh, how’d you get this scholarship? How’d you do it? How’d you get into college? What’d you say? What’d you do?” And it’s like, okay, these people are slowly starting to look up to other people.