Rio Salado College’s national division targets “education deserts” around the country. Can that strategy work?
Rio Salado College, a mostly online community college in Maricopa County, Ariz., is one of the first community colleges to launch a “national division” targeting students all over the country to take online classes and earn degrees or certificates. Administrators say the division, which debuted last fall, targets “education deserts” where postsecondary programs can be hard to access.
“This only adds to what we’re doing locally in Maricopa and how we support Maricopa residents in the state of Arizona in providing a flexible delivery model for students,” said Janelle Elias, interim vice president of Rio National.
The college defines an education desert as an area more than an hour’s commute from “a main campus” of a college or university, which is also how some others have chosen to define it. Some researchers also specify that that campus must be broadly accessible, meaning highly selective colleges may still be present in an education desert. Rio Salado administrators say they have identified education deserts in every state, but they did not specify how many they have found, emphasizing that they are still in the early stages of the national division.