The authors describe the critical issues that emerged during the first years of the National Rural Fellows Program at its academic base, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, and how these issues were subsequently addressed. The Program is designed to provide intensive training leading to a Master's degree for adult minority professionals from rural backgrounds throughout the United States. As a case study, the paper has implications for other departments considering innovations of this sort. It particularly describes the pedagogical and socio-cultural issues regarding the education of adult minority professionals, the potential for new faculty perspectives to be gained from such interaction, and the challenge to traditional regional planning curricula for rural planning across the United States.