When Dustin Gordon arrived at the University of Iowa, he found himself taking lecture classes with more people in them than his entire hometown of Sharpsburg, Iowa, population 89.
Credit: Ben Smith/The Hechinger Report

When Dustin Gordon’s high school invited juniors and seniors to meet with recruiters from colleges and universities, a handful of students showed up.

A few were serious about the prospect of continuing their educations, he said, “But I think some of them went just to get out of class.”

In his sparsely settled community in the agricultural countryside of southern Iowa, “there’s just no motivation for people to go” to college, says Gordon, who’s now a senior at the University of Iowa.

“When they’re ready to be done with high school, they think, ‘That’s all the school I need, and I’m just going to go and find a job.’ ” That job, Gordon explains, might be on the family farm or at the egg-packaging plant or the factory that makes pulleys and conveyor belts, or driving trucks that haul grain.

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