Strengthening Education-to-Career Pathways in Rural Areas

Rural communities, often overlooked and underestimated, are powerful hubs of collaboration and innovation driving education and workforce transformation. While rural areas make up 20% of the U.S. population, rural initiatives only receive 7% of philanthropic funding.

In May 2024, Jobs for the Future (JFF) celebrated and amplified ongoing work to enhance education-to-career pathways work in rural communities through a webinar series inspired by JFF’s Design and Implementation of College and Career Pathways in Rural Communities report. The series, “Education and Workforce Transformation in Rural Communities,” explored unique strengths and challenges in these areas by spotlighting initiatives that focus on dual enrollment, quality green jobs, work-based learning, and rural immigrant populations. Our goal was to feature examples of how rural leaders across the country are working to implement pathways solutions in their communities, share best practices, and inspire innovation in other communities.

This blog features highlights of each episode of the series, with lists of recommended actions related to each topic, along with links webinar recordings and presentation slides.

The webinar series highlighted actionable steps that rural communities can take to enhance their education-to-career pathways. By following these strategies, communities can effectively design and implement initiatives that not only meet local needs, but also cultivate sustainable pathways and transform broader education and workforce development systems.

Rural Dual Enrollment

Presentation Deck: JFF Rural Dual Enrollment Webinar Slides

Dual enrollment, or programs with courses that count for both high school and college credit, is a proven strategy for supporting college enrollment and persistence and is especially important for rural students, who have lower educational attainment rates than their urban peers. To ensure that dual enrollment opportunities are accessible and tailored to the unique needs of rural students, continuous innovation in their design is essential, including the addition of online course offerings. JFF’s Pathways to Prosperity team is at the forefront of this effort, testing a cutting-edge online dual enrollment model that incorporates social-emotional learning as part of our Increasing College Access Network (ICAN) initiative.

Recommended actions to increase dual enrollment access and success for rural high school students:

1. Identify training options for instructors to enhance teaching methods and build in opportunities to deepen connections between instructors and students through social-emotional learning (SEL), which is particularly important for online learning environments where it can be difficult to establish relationships. Online dual enrollment requires that students have key skills such as self-motivation and proactive initiative to complete the course, and these skills can be developed through an SEL approach. The benefits of infusing dual enrollment courses with SEL are clear: Research shows that embedding SEL into a curriculum increases student performance by 11% compared to students in courses without this approach.
2. Design targeted recruitment approaches, including translating materials and presentations into other languages. Rural communities often include diverse populations, including immigrants and indigenous groups, whose primary language may not be English.
3. Identify established funding sources and new funding opportunities for student supports and create policies that promote equitable access to courses. This can be done by identifying and removing barriers such as a lack of access to technology, high-quality wireless internet connections, and dedicated learning space.
4. Strategically select dual enrollment courses that open doors and accelerate students toward degree completion. It’s crucial to establish an agreement between partnering colleges and school districts that outlines clear roles and responsibilities, goals, timelines, data sharing practices, supports, and funding.

Rural Green Jobs

Presentation Deck: JFF Rural Green Jobs Webinar Slides

While national coordination in addressing climate change and its workforce impact is crucial, regional leadership is also essential for strengthening local economies and tackling the climate crisis. Ensuring an inclusive and fair transition into a greener economy will require rural regions to be at the forefront of green skill integration. JFF’s Quality Green Jobs Regional Challenge supports regional strategies to expand access to quality green jobs.

Recommended actions for expanding access to quality green jobs for rural workers:

1. Identify key stakeholders and allies who can influence and advocate for policy changes. For example, mobilizing grassroots support and community leaders who understand local needs and priorities can strengthen advocacy efforts and ensure that policies are tailored to rural challenges and opportunities. To contend with challenges created by geographic isolation and limited local resources, rural communities often need to collaborate with regional or state networks.
2. Diversify engagement strategies by partnering with trusted community-based organizations to foster greater participation in rural green workforce initiatives that may be unfamiliar or new to communities. Offer practical support that rural residents may need, such as transportation, food, and child care services, as well as participation stipends. Ensure inclusivity by providing translators and translated materials when needed. These efforts show an investment in connecting and understanding needs and bridging trust by designing programs with communities to complement local strengths.
3. It’s vital to develop language that aligns with shared cultural values to gain support for green career pathways by explaining how green jobs are achievable, accessible, and aligned with workforce needs. This shared language can help bridge differences and reduce barriers to engagement in rural communities with diverse populations.

Rural Apprenticeships

Presentation Deck: JFF Rural Apprenticeships and WBL Webinar Slides

As rural communities grow, equitable access to workforce training is crucial to prepare a skilled talent pipeline. As part of the larger work-based learning landscape, apprenticeships help individuals prepare for work, but rural areas face unique challenges in building and sustaining these programs.

Recommended actions to create accessible apprenticeships and other work-based learning opportunities for rural residents:

1. Collaborate with diverse stakeholders, including industry, workforce, and education partners, to tailor training to specific regional and industry needs. Employers in rural areas are often challenged because they have smaller workforces and overall populations to recruit from and a limited capacity to deliver training. Collaborating with a range of partners will ensure that programs are aligned with specific industry needs and with the appropriate structures and supports, such as academic readiness and wraparound services. This approach helps participants succeed and acquire skills that are most sought after in their regions.
2. Build organizational knowledge and expertise in apprenticeship. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Registered Apprenticeship system is complex and can take time to navigate. By developing internal expertise, organizations can better position themselves to develop and implement sustainable, high-quality programs and be leaders in their local and regional workforce systems. This approach can also support employer and community engagement with earn-and-learn models, which help retain local talent to support the economic health of communities by increasing access to quality jobs.
3. It’s important to implement practices that support equity and access to help all workers and learners benefit from work-based learning and apprenticeship opportunities. These measures can include using a common application to make it easier for individuals to apply to multiple opportunities, offering training materials in a variety of formats and languages, and partnering with a diverse network of stakeholders to provide participants with supportive services.

Rural Immigrant Populations

Presentation Deck: JFF Rural Immigrant Success Webinar Slides

Immigrants and refugees play a vital role in rural economies, helping offset population decline, participating in the workforce, sustaining local economies, and enhancing cultural diversity. Despite these contributions, workforce development initiatives and philanthropic funding focused on immigrant populations or rural populations rarely combine these efforts. This underinvestment opens an opportunity gap, and largely leaves unchallenged the systemic barriers faced by immigrants and refugees in rural settings, such as a lack of access to quality education and training. JFF’s Rural Immigrant Success Exchange (RISE) network focuses on the economic advancement of immigrants, refugees, and migrant workers in rural areas.

Recommended actions to prioritize rural immigrant populations:

1. Research participant and community contexts, adopting an asset-based approach to overcome barriers to quality jobs. Rural areas often have distinct assets, such as growing populations due to immigration, a history of innovation in critical industries (such as manufacturing and agriculture), and close-knit communities. It’s important to invest early in relationship-building and establish formal and reciprocal partnerships with local governments, chambers of commerce, and service providers.
2. Entrepreneurship is a flexible and accessible pathway to economic mobility for immigrants. It’s crucial to develop contextualized programs and partnerships designed to address the unique challenges faced by entrepreneurs in rural communities. Successful rural entrepreneurship programs have creatively circumnavigated these small-business barriers by building relationships with immigrant-friendly lenders, convening sector specific networks, braiding funding to provide wrap-around services, and offering one-on-one coaching and mentoring.
3. Create events, programs, and spaces that encourage interactions between diverse community members to foster understanding and appreciation of different cultures. Building a strong, interconnected rural community enhances resilience to social and economic challenges.

While there are many best practices to broadly support education-to-career pathways, it’s important to recognize and celebrate actions that are particularly meaningful in rural contexts. Rural communities are not a monolith, but they share a common resilience and innovative spirit that drives meaningful change. We must continue to elevate and amplify lessons shared by rural education and workforce leaders so we can all build accessible, equitable education-to-career pathways.

To learn more about JFF’s efforts to help transform pathways in rural communities, explore our rural pathways report.

This webinar series was developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Education Innovation and Research program. However, this content does not necessarily reflect U.S. Department of Education policy, and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government.