Drawing from reports of rural graduates' insights, the study examined whether graduates of small school districts serving rural areas systematically differ from graduates of more metropolitan school districts. Primary data were collected during a four-year longitudinal study of students attending small schools serving rural areas (Project Rural). Survey questionnaires were mailed to 1,028 high school graduates in 9 rural school districts one year after they graduated. Only 289 of the 1974 graduates responded. Selected data from a national probability sample of 16,000 cases was used to assess the representativeness of the smaller sample, and to compare the differences in attitudes between urban, suburban, small town, and rural senior high school students. Information from a questionnaire on the activities, ideas, and feelings of the students during their senior year was analyzed to determine which of the items most clearly predicted what the pupils would be doing a year after graduation. Among the major conclusions were: few rural graduates one year after graduation were leaving their home communities to seek jobs elsewhere; graduates usually left to continue their education; patterns of postgraduate activities were very different across school districts and not easily explained by community demographic differences; when district variations were averaged out, rural, small town, suburban and urban graduates were "surprisingly similar" in terms of values, attitudes and in their evaluations of the schools. (NQ)