As a graduate of a very rural American school (to give you an idea, my entire pre-k through 12th grade school was housed in a single building, with below 500 kids total; my graduating class was just over 30 students, and I was one of 3 who went on to a 4-year school -- fewer than 10 of us went to any college at all)... this article isn't very good. Like some other commenters have pointed out, the author failed to interview any rural teens besides a single college student -- the rest of the article is just listing statistics, which isn't inherently bad, but doesn't give us much of an idea of why rural teens aren't attending college.

In my anecdotal experience, the reason in simple: parents in rural areas don't value a college education (probably because many of them never attended college themselves, opting for blue collar work instead), and thus don't encourage their kids to attend college. Throughout my childhood, kids seemed to glorify blue collar work and even look down on white collar workers; I recall being bullied quite a bit because my parents were educated and encouraged me to work hard in school.

That might be common behaviour in a lot of schools, but it was especially demoralizing in my case because I had no friends my age who valued education. And even if I did, before I turned 16 I wouldn't have been able to see them outside of school anyway, since both of my parents worked, I couldn't drive, and most students in my class lived at least 10 miles from my house over largely 60mph speed limit country roads -- not to mention the brutal winters in my area which would prevent even the shortest biking or walking travel. Without peers to learn alongside, I'll admit that my motivation to educate myself suffered. An even bigger problem was the lack of opportunities in my area: by the time I reached senior year of high school, I had literally one class left to take with a teacher at my school (Calc I, a class some of my college friends took their freshman year of high school). Instead, I opted to take classes at the local community college my senior year... but since I wasn't technically a high school graduate yet, I was forced to pay full sticker price (maybe 2k for the year?) out of my own pocket -- not a very good way to encourage students to aim high.

Besides the lack of opportunity and the lack of motivated peers, it was also incredibly crushing to apply to schools and constantly miss out on programs designed to give underprivileged students a leg up simply because I'm not in their target demographics. Both of my parents worked 40+ hour weeks, yet my family was only barely middle class -- which actually made my life harder when I applied for financial aid, since the government expected me to come up with 20k a year out of pocket, since I didn't qualify as poor enough to warrant better aid. And when I finally got to my college, most students started ahead of me in introductory classes since my high school didn't offer any AP or IB classes.

Based on my experience, I wouldn't recommend anybody bring up their kids in a rural area in America. You're effectively trading a childhood of enriching experiences for slightly cheaper rent and less traffic.