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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Forty-two percent of people ages 18 to 24 are enrolled in all of higher education, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, but only 29 percent of rural people in that age group are enrolled, compared with nearly 48 percent from cities.

Dustin Gordon felt that keenly. The regional school he attended houses all 12 grades in the same building. There were 29 students in his graduating class. But when, after first enrolling at community college, he transferred to the University of Iowa, he found himself in lecture classes with more people in them than his entire hometown of Sharpsburg, population 89.

"Coming from a rural community, everybody knows who you are," says Gordon, who quarterbacked his high school football team, played baseball and ran track and field. When he got to the University of Iowa — with more than 33,000 students from around the country and around the world — "I literally knew nobody on campus," he says. "It's just kind of intimidating."

....... To read the full article written by Jon Marcus and Matt Krupnick, click here:  Who's Missing From America's Colleges? Rural High School Graduates