Rural help: Boise State launches pilot program in Mountain Home, McCall, Payette

New Boise State University President Marlene Tromp on Friday announced the target of a pilot program aimed at increasing diversity, inclusion and success at Boise State: rural Idaho.

Mountain Home, McCall and Payette are the communities selected for the program, which will start next fall.

Speaking before 300 or so people at Boise Centre during a state of the university address to the business community hosted by the Boise Metro Chamber, Tromp explained how growing up in Rock Springs, Wyo., helped formulate her commitment to supporting rural communities.

“Only a handful of people that I went to school with went on to college, and I had so many talented and creative peers,” she said. “I look out at our rural communities across the state of Idaho and I think how much talent is there that isn’t feeding into the state? How can we reach out to those young people and, in fact, to their parents, who might want a credential as the world changes? How do we support those folks to advance those communities so that they thrive?”

While serving as vice provost and dean at Arizona State University, Tromp said she piloted a “hybrid” program to reach Native Americans.

“Nationally, the Native American Indian population has about a 4 to 6 percent graduation rate,” Tromp said, and the program changed that dramatically.

The ASU program combines off-campus teaching and online classes.

“We sent faculty out to the community to teach live the first week of classes,” she explained. “They got connected to the students. The students got connected to them.”

For the next 12 weeks, the students took online classes, Tromp explained.

“Then at week 12, before they had to do their final papers, their final exams, their final projects, we sent those faculty back out again to have face-to-face contact with those students,” she said. “You know what our success rate was in that pilot program? Eighty-six percent.”

Shortly after taking the helm at Boise State on July 1, Tromp logged more than 2,000 miles by driving across the state to visit more than a dozen large and small communities to get a better sense of Idaho’s diverse landscapes. While traversing the Gem State, she was thinking about ways Boise State could better serve rural students.

Her experience with ASU’s pilot program came to mind.

“We are building this program to pilot in three rural communities in Idaho for next fall,” Tromp announced Friday.

Details of the program have yet to be worked out, but finding different ways to get students into college, and then helping them connect while there, is what it’s all about, she explained.

“As an academic, what drives me is how do we help every single student succeed. Every single student,” she said. “The more students succeed, our community thrives, our state thrives. I am interested in catching students wherever we can catch them — if we catch them because they are first gen(eration), if we catch them because they are rural.

“If we help students connect because of who they are in any part of their person and that helps them be academically successful, I am so proud of that, because I want every last student to succeed.”

This story was originally published November 15, 2019 at 4:48 PM.