Reconnecting the Rural Way: TICAS Rural Reconnect Initiative

In 2025, TICAS launched the Rural Reconnect Initiative, an effort to advance college completion and economic mobility for residents of rural communities in the South and Southwest by identifying promising postsecondary education strategies and policies to reengage students with some college and no credential (SCNC). Grounded in TICAS’ postsecondary attainment research, this project is designed to understand efforts by rural institutions to support returning learners, to identify data-driven practices for other institutions to adopt, and for the research field to more fully evaluate and translate findings into resources for institutions and policymakers to support the reenrollment of the 43 million learners across the country who have left college before earning a postsecondary credential of value.

Guidance and Key Insights from the Rural Reconnect Advisory Group

TICAS formed the Rural Reconnect Advisory Group (RRAG), a diverse group of experts composed of higher education and workforce leaders, researchers, practitioners, and advocates to guide this work. Rooted in the Initiative’s target states of Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, RRAG members share knowledge about successful reengagement strategies for the SCNC population. Key initial findings include:

• State higher education organizations can play a significant role in providing data and analysis to institutions to better understand the SCNC population and the academic and non-academic supports they need to be successful. States with a coordinating body that collects centralized data can share information with institutions about resident students that have earned some college credits after enrolling at one of the state’s postsecondary institutions but have not returned during consecutive terms and have not earned a degree or certificate. This aids institutions by helping them to identify potential students for recruitment and outreach. By coordinating efforts at the system level, statewide initiatives can be developed, expanded, and refined to remove barriers for returning students, especially those in rural communities.
• Unsurprisingly, rural institutions have capacity and resource constraints to implement evidence-based programs. Rural institutions that are successful in implementing programming for the SCNC population often partner with external organizations, like national intermediaries, community-based organizations, and industry partners, for technical support and program development, but the sustainability of those efforts remains a concern.
• Students and research recognize Rural Serving Institutions (RSIs), many of which are also Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), for their deep community connections, cultural competence, and ability to foster a sense of belonging. These institutional attributes are especially important for learners who are returning to postsecondary education after stopping out.

Forthcoming Resources for Supporting Rural Learners with Some College

In 2026, the TICAS College Completion team is partnering with MDRC to engage with administrators, staff, and students at RSIs to learn about their current practices to help stopped-out students return to college and complete their degrees. Their experiences and input will inform the development of multiple resources for the field, including:

• An implementation guide to help rural institutions with the adoption of best practices for the reengagement of SCNC populations that can improve educational and workforce outcomes for individuals and communities.
• An interactive data tool to identify the concentration of the SCNC population across the United States—recognizing that data collection on rural learners is not easy—disaggregated by key metrics such as rurality, age, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and income by educational attainment, which can ultimately help to target completion and reengagement efforts.
• Recommendations for policymakers to address the systemic barriers to better serving SCNC learners in the rural South and Southwest, as well as nationally.

The Rural Reconnect Initiative is an opportunity to build more robust evidence on what it takes to achieve economic mobility for rural learners through college reenrollment and degree completion—and address a critical gap in the field’s collective knowledge about what works for these learners.