The Marginalization of Rural Communities: A Mixed-Methods Study of Equity Within Rural Postsecondary Career and Technical Education

Rural communities are underserved in education research, policy, and funding initiatives especially within CTE. What makes a community or educational institution rural is also unclear as there are at minimum 23 federal and 140 state definitions of rural and most do not agree. The purpose of this mixed methods research was to find public, 2-year postsecondary institutions that lie within an area of definitional disagreement and to assess their educational equity concerns through the testimony of their administrators. Seventy-one institutions and 251 campus locations within Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin were identified as lying within an area of rural disagreement based on a geospatial analysis of federal rural definitions and Census Bureau and IPEDS data. This geospatial analysis also determined that there was a statistically significant bias in institutional location toward less-rural census tracts leaving rural population (p < 0.05). Administrators of these institutions were invited to participate in an interview to express their lived experiences regarding the provision of CTE and provide their definition of rurality. Twelve administrators took part and their responses were thematically analyzed. Ten emergent themes were categorized according to Tomaševski’s 4-A framework for educational equity and demonstrate a clear difference in experiences at rural versus nonrural institutions. The research also determined that a possibility exists for a unifying definition of rurality within education and presented an example of communicating results of rural research without using deficit terms. This research concluded that rural communities exhibit all hallmarks of marginalization and are therefore de facto marginalized communities