It’s our pleasure to be working with Professor Mara Tieken, author of Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges—and What It Costs Them, released by the University of Chicago Press.

Mara Casey Tieken is a professor of education at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Her research focuses on educational equity for rural students and communities, including rural college access, rural school closure, and rural racial justice. She is the author of Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges—and What It Costs Them (University of Chicago Press, 2025), which was a 2025 American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Book Award winner. Through the stories of nine rural first-generation students attending an elite liberal arts college, it shows that geography shapes college opportunity, from admission to post-graduation options. Her 2014 book, Why Rural Schools Matter (University of North Carolina Press), is an ethnographic study examining how rural schools define and sustain their surrounding communities. She is currently working on a multi-year, grant-funded project that documents, examines, and communicates the impacts of school closures on rural Black communities in the Arkansas Delta. She is also involved in the work of the National Education Research and Development Center for Improving Rural Postsecondary Education; she is co-Principal Investigator on a study of rural-serving college access organizations. Her work has been published in Review of Educational Research, Rural Sociology, Harvard Educational Review, American Educational Research Journal, Peabody Journal of Education, and Sociological Focus, and she is an associate editor of the Journal of Research in Rural Education.

Mara is the 2024 recipient of the Bates’s Kroepsch Award, which acknowledges excellence in teaching and the 2016 recipient of the Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement for Early Career Faculty. She designed and maintains a web-based toolkit for rural communities fighting school closure. In 2011, she received her Doctorate of Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Before beginning her graduate work, she taught third grade and adult education in rural Tennessee.