Benbow Receives NSF Grant to Study College Success for Rural STEM Students

November 10, 2025   |   By Karen Rivedal, Office of Research & Scholarship

UW–Madison scientist Ross Benbow will use a three-year, nearly $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to better understand how the social networks of students from rural Wisconsin influence their success in college.

“I’m interested in the transitions students make between different kinds of social and cultural environments. University campuses can be much different from where many of these rural undergraduates come from,” said Benbow, a researcher based in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) in the School of Education. “In this study we’ll be looking at how students’ relationships influence their transitions as well as how they may help students as they pursue their degrees.”

The study will be longitudinal, following rural students over time who attend college across Universities of Wisconsin campuses, where rural university access has been a high-profile issue. Benbow’s work will specifically focus on students pursuing degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, in keeping with NSF’s core interest in developing a skilled STEM workforce.

Benbow noted that rural STEM university students are an understudied population that could strengthen and broaden the STEM workforce, a key national priority. Existing research, though, reveals potential tensions amid the promise.

“Rural communities often promote hard work, collaboration and problem-solving abilities that are important in STEM fields. Rural students also often show more STEM career interest in secondary school than their urban or suburban peers,” said Benbow. “But geographic and socioeconomic factors can complicate their STEM pathways—they’re currently underrepresented in four-year universities and STEM programs.”

Research suggests that rural university students may have stronger ties with their home communities than their peers do, ties that form distinct and resource-rich social support networks. But more study is needed to document these networks and discover whether they connect to students’ STEM persistence, Benbow said.

“I want to see how these connections work, whether they are motivating in different contexts,” he said. “The stereotype is that a lot of these students’ home communities do not have positive feelings about universities, and that folks from home may discourage academic success. There’s very likely much more to it than that.”

Benbow is principal investigator of the study, with co-PI You-Geon Lee, another WCER researcher. The two have partnered before on NSF-funded studies focused on the college experiences of student military members or veterans in a national project known as the Veteran Education to Workforce Affinity and Success Study (VETWAYS).

The new rural student study involves administering two online surveys, 18 months apart, to a group of 500 rural students and 500 non-rural students across eleven Universities of Wisconsin campuses, including UW–Madison. Benbow is working with partner institutions to plan survey distribution now, which will take place next semester.

Answers to the surveys will constitute the quantitative part of the mixed-methods study, while interviews with a subgroup of rural students will make up the qualitative part.

Benbow’s team will then use descriptive statistics and regression models to analyze survey data and inductive coding to analyze the interviews, ideally allowing the project team to:

• Map rural student networks and trajectories between the two phases.
• Examine links between social networks and STEM career persistence.
• Compare rural and nonrural student networks and STEM persistence.
• Capture personal perspectives of rural university students on their networks and transition issues.

The researchers expect to generate “valuable new experiential and relational knowledge” through the study, Benbow said, with results to be shared through presentations, reports, scholarly articles and public media to enable a wide array of stakeholders to access them.

Benbow hopes findings will help educators and policymakers better understand how to support rural university students, and that other researchers can build on the study’s data collection tools and findings in further work on marginalized STEM populations.

The project started Sept. 1, 2025, and is scheduled to run through Aug. 31, 2028.