We didn’t come to college to leave home behind; we came trying to figure out how to carry it with us.
Luke is a sophomore student from Tazewell County in Southwest Virginia. Haley is his professor who grew up in rural Lincoln County, West Virginia, and was the first in her family to go to college. Within the first few weeks of class, we recognized something familiar in each other. Not because we came from the exact same place, but because we were both used to living in between worlds.
At a place like Washington and Lee University, that in-between feeling shows up in small ways. It’s a place full of opportunity, where many students arrive with experiences that have already introduced them to things like internships, professional networks and the rhythms of college life. Conversations move easily between opportunities and possibilities, and there’s an assumption that you’ll learn how to navigate it all. For some of us, that means picking up a new language along the way. We figure out how office hours work, what a “network” really is, and how to move through systems that were never fully explained out loud. You can succeed here and still feel like you’re translating yourself every day. So we started with a question that felt personal before it ever became political: how do students from rural communities cross into higher education without losing their footing or the places they come from?
To understand that question, it helps to know what TRIO is and where it comes from. Established through the Higher Education Act of 1965, it was a product of the broader War on Poverty. TRIO is a collection of federally funded programs designed to support students who have been historically underrepresented in higher education — particularly first-generation college students, students from low-income backgrounds, and students with disabilities. What began with just three programs — Upward Bound, Talent Search and Student Support Services— has grown into a network that serves hundreds of thousands of students across the country each year.
From its outset, TRIO was built on the recognition that talent is universal, but opportunity, unfortunately, isn’t. It emerged from a policy understanding that barriers to higher education are determined by social structures, not by individuals. For Brandon Honaker, now the director of Upward Bound at Southwest Virginia Community College and a proud alumnus of the same program, this recognition was never theoretical. It was a lived experience.
Raised in a single‑parent household where college was deeply valued but often felt out of reach, Brandon entered Upward Bound as a high school freshman who knew he wanted to pursue higher education but needed real guidance to get there. “TRIO wasn’t a handout,” he explains. “It was a hand‑up. Someone walking alongside me and showing me what was possible.” That support did more than help Brandon enroll in college. It shaped his career and his commitment to educational access. After spending 15 years as an Upward Bound advisor and eventually becoming its director, he now works with students whose questions mirror the doubts he once carried. His story is a reminder that TRIO’s impact goes well beyond individual success. It creates lasting cycles of opportunity that strengthen families and communities.
That’s where TRIO comes in. Neither of us had the opportunity to participate in TRIO programs like Upward Bound, but through our research and through listening to students and educators who have, we’ve come to understand what they make possible. TRIO isn’t a scholarship you apply for and forget about. It’s a set of relationships, advisors, mentors and tutors. The people who help you understand how college actually works. They’re the ones who walk you through financial aid forms that no one at your kitchen table has ever filled out. They’re the ones who tell you it’s okay to ask for help. They’re the ones who notice when you’re starting to slip and step in before you fall.
In rural communities, the distance to college isn’t just measured in miles. It’s measured in access. Fewer counselors, fewer people who have gone before you, fewer built-in explanations of how any of this works. It’s measured by the quiet question many students carry: Is this even for someone like me?
This is why what’s happening right now matters so much. Over the past year, TRIO has been caught in a mix of proposed cuts and delayed funding, alongside broader policy discussions about the future of the U.S. Department of Education and the scope of federal involvement in education. Recent budget proposals have included the possibility of reducing funding or eliminating it, while administrative changes and staffing reductions within the DOE have raised concerns about the consistency and, thus, timing of grant distributions. In some cases, funding decisions have been reversed or delayed; in other cases, funding has been cut entirely.
What’s particularly concerning is not just the cuts, but the direction of some of these changes. Take Talent Search, for example. While employment training is immensely important, the program is being fundamentally redesigned away from a college access program and toward a pipeline for employment training, urging programs to prepare middle and high school students for careers “in high demand fields such as skilled trades, healthcare, manufacturing, information technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and shipbuilding and other occupations critical for the defense industrial base.”
We’re not opposed to programs that support trades, by any means; they are honest work that builds communities — both of our fathers were/are workers in blue-collar fields. But access to postsecondary education should remain a critical pathway, especially for students whose communities lack other routes to economic mobility. When a federal program designed for college access gets repurposed, it narrows the options for students who need them most.
The structural changes are just as significant: the request for proposals, a document inviting organizations to apply for funding, gives the DOE the ability to award grants of up to $10,000,000 to states, whereas traditionally, grants are awarded in amounts of $250K-$400K. This shift toward block grants to states instead of individual grants to institutions will result in at least a 67% reduction in the number of Talent Search programs.
This is already happening — right now, across the commonwealth. Programs are unsure whether they can hire staff, run fall programming or what to tell students and families who are counting on them. In places where trust in institutions is already fragile, that kind of uncertainty lands hard. When a bridge is fragile — solid one moment and uncertain the next — people don’t just worry about crossing it. They start to question whether it was ever built for them in the first place.
One of the reasons this has felt so urgent for us is the class we met in. In Foundations of Education at Washington and Lee University, we spend the semester asking how opportunity actually gets built. Not in theory, but in real systems shaped by policy, funding and history. We talk about how education isn’t neutral. It reflects choices about who gets support, when and how consistently. Luke spent the semester working on a policy brief about student mental health in his home community, where schools often carry more than they were ever designed to carry because other supports are limited or far away. That same lens applies here. Once you start to see support systems as infrastructure (the thing that makes opportunity possible), you can’t unsee what happens when they wobble. TRIO is that kind of infrastructure.
We’ve also been thinking a lot about trust. Back home, college doesn’t always feel like a sure bet. It’s expensive. It can feel culturally distant. Sometimes it sounds like a place where people go to become someone else or to look down on where they came from. And to be honest, higher education hasn’t always done a great job of pushing back on that perception. So students like Luke and people like Haley end up trying to hold two things at once: loyalty to where we’re from and belief in what education makes possible. That’s not always an easy balance. It can feel like standing in the middle of a bridge, trying to keep it steady from both sides.
This is where TRIO matters in a way that goes beyond access or enrollment numbers. At its best, TRIO doesn’t just help students get to college. It helps them stay and make sense of where they are without losing who they are. It doesn’t assume students need to be fixed. It assumes the system needs to be made navigable. It says you belong here, and you don’t have to figure it out alone. In a moment when trust in institutions is shaky, that kind of steady, human support matters more than ever.
Here is what we want to say to our neighbors, relatives, and friends back home — people who are unsure whether to trust college: your skepticism is not irrational. College has gotten expensive. The cultural distance is real. And higher education institutions have sometimes spoken about rural communities rather than with them.
But we also want to say this: education can still be a path that honors where you came from. The goal is not to “escape” a rural community or to become someone else. The goal is to gain tools, credentials, confidence, networks and knowledge that you can carry back, whether that return is physical or in the form of supporting and speaking for rural communities. TRIO embodies that goal: it does not ask people to stop being who they are; it helps them learn the rules of a system that was not written with them in mind.
And to policymakers, we want to say: if you are serious about rural prosperity, you cannot treat college access programs as line items that can be “paused” without consequence. When TRIO funding is threatened or delayed, rural students don’t just lose services; they lose trust. Families begin to feel confirmed in their skepticism. Communities hear, once again, that the system wasn’t built with them in mind. What’s at stake isn’t just programming. It’s a belief.
We’re not asking for anything abstract. We’re asking for consistency. We are asking for programs to be funded reliably and for funding to be released on time so people can actually do their jobs. We’re asking policymakers to recognize that rural access isn’t just a talking point but a set of real conditions that require real support. And on campuses like ours, we’re asking for investment not just in getting rural students in the door, but in helping them feel like they can stay and thrive. Because getting in is only the first step. The harder work is crossing and staying connected to both sides.
We both care deeply about the places we are from. We also believe in what education can do. We don’t think those two things should be in conflict. TRIO, at its best, is one of the few things that makes that possible. It’s a bridge that doesn’t ask you to burn one side to reach the other. It just helps you cross, and possibly return, steadily, supported and still yourself.
Haley Sigler is director of education studies and professor of education at Washington and Lee University. A first-generation college student from rural West Virginia, she earned her undergraduate degree from University of Kentucky, a master’s degree from Hollins University, and a Ph.D. from University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the teaching of writing and teacher professional development, with an emphasis on supporting educators as reflective practitioners.
Luke Davis is a first-generation college student from Richlands. As a pre-law student and sophomore at Washington and Lee University, he is majoring in politics and minoring in education policy. He is a graduate of Southwest Virginia Community College and Richlands High School.
