Rick Foster, vice president for programs at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, presented the plenary address at last month’s National Outreach Scholarship Conference. An excerpt:

“We [at the Kellogg Foundation] are committed to higher education as long as higher education is committed to the community.

“One of the communities most in need of advocacy is rural America. It is the place where it’s most chronically underemployed. As we know, everyone in rural America has two or three jobs because they have to. It has the lowest wage. It has the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease, teen pregnancy, drug abuse. All the things that we used to shudder about happening in the inner city, those statistics are now worse in rural America than they are in any other sector.

“What will bring back rural America?

“We need to instill hope and create opportunity to slow the out migration of youth. The land-grant university is the model for the future. You have the power to convene and bring disparate partners together. You have the power to apply knowledge to problems of people. Rural America is not crying out for more assistance but for more opportunity.”