47 ms·

Who's Missing from America's Colleges? Rural High School Graduates

257 points by jofer 9y ago

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
My Scouts from a rural community are largely not college-bound. Some do community college for a year or two; some enter the military. Most others get a certificate and work at contracting/construction/electrician type jobs. They do well. One bright bookish young man was an exception. My wife heard he was discouraged about college, so she researched and came up with a program to send qualified rural students to college. He's at Auburn, at little or no cost to his family now. But he was an exception.
- matthewwiese 9y ago
  Lovely to hear that your wife had the wherewithal to do that! As an Eagle Scout myself it always puts a smile on my face when I hear about a Scout finding success (after having worked to earn it). The program did a lot for developing my charisma and work ethic, not to mention the lasting friendships I have til this day. There are certainly gold nuggets hidden under all that fetishistic patriotism and religious handwringing. Much luck to him. From one Scout to another. :)
forkLding 9y ago
Theres also the concern if you're not really doing a STEM subject that has high career prospects, its not really worth it to take on student debt from college only to graduate without a stable career. I think this may also be a concern to people from rural areas who can have livable careers without college.
- watwut 9y ago
  Rural areas tend to be poorest as far as whites go. They are not full of great jobs.
  - forkLding 9y ago
    Agreed, however living and housing costs tend to be low, so relatively speaking, with a not-so-great job, can still have a livable career.
    - gowld 9y ago
      If the finances balanced like this, Ii's unlikely that cities would be such popular destinations for young adults. I expect you'd find that the missing income is even greater than the savings in costs of living.
      - dorchadas 9y ago
        I dunno. I think there's more to the draw of cities. Like, I personally know I'm saving less living in a "city" than I could be living in my hometown... But, there's a lot more to do, it's a lot more culturally diverse, etc etc. I value that more than the extra money I could be saving. I'm willing to bet others value things like that, as well as the career opportunities, that come with cities.
      - jschwartzi 9y ago
        Or they do balance like this but the opportunities you miss out on as a young person are worth far more to you than the cost of living. That's certainly how it worked for me. I could have lived off $20.00/hr in the rural area I grew up in, but I would be isolated or stuck going to church for all of my social interactions. In the city I can't live comfortably off less than $30.00 but other people are right outside my door.
    - Slansitartop 9y ago
      But college costs the same for everyone. On average, I see more expensive cars in the Bay Area than I do in my home state. I suspect that's because they're proportionally cheaper to someone who can afford to live there.
      - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  This is a risk, like anything else. But in aggregate college graduates make far more money than non-graduates, much more than would offset even the crazy tuition today.
VLM 9y ago
Fascinating that culturally the author couldn't bring himself to talk to the kids. The only kid he talked to was one of the unusual college attendees. Kind of shocking if you think about it. He repeated a lot of narrative from numerous professional axe grinders, but nothing can really be learned from that. It wasn't a story about the rural kids who don't go to college, it was a story about politicians axe grinding where the claimed subject was never considered; could have been a story "about" Bolivian tin exports or farm subsidies for all the subject mattered to the discussion. An analysis mode the author didn't consider is time. The rate of attendance has increased dramatically over time. Attendance is a little less than 10% lower for rural kids, and google nearly instantly found a graph of college attendance per year indicating the rate has been increasing at a fairly linear rate of a bit less than five percent per decade, so rural kids are not living in a dystopia as much as they're living in roughly the early 00s. Not a bad time to live, really. Culturally I'm sure there are variations in attitude in various areas and having 2005 cultural attitudes in the year 2018 isn't really much of an issue especially if your friends family neighbors and employer have attitudes that are significantly pre-2005 anyway. An interesting analysis mode is comparing supply and demand. According to the linked Washington Post article below, only 27% of college grads in America work in a job closely related to their degree, and "The chances of finding a job related to your degree or major go up a few points if you move to a big city". The kids might be intelligent enough to see that taking out a home mortgage sized student loan to get a degree that will not lead to gainful employment is a poor investment. The article further states only 62 percent of grads had a job that requiring a degree. You can hand wave a lot, but around 4/5 of rural kids are throwing money away if they go to college. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/20/only-27-percent-of-college-grads-have-a-job-related-to-their-major https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/20/only-... The advice on HN usually skews toward advice for SAT score recipients above 1475 points or so... please remember this is a discussion about 100% of American kids not the 1%. Based on the numbers, college was a waste of money for somewhere between one third and three quarters of attendees, so rural kids not wasting money on a bad investment is not exactly a crisis.
- watwut 9y ago
  College grads do better then those who did not went to college - in terms of earnings, home ownership and just about any other stat I have seen. They do worst then grads of previous generation through. The worst off are those who took debt and then dropped out. Picking up grads as argument against college is odd, given that their results are not as bad as results of other demographic groups.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nugi 9y ago
The world continues to focus on cities, while the rest of the people are left behind. I notice a clear metropolitan bias on HN, often incredulous that 1st world citizens are still living in a unimproved state. Even an 30min from one of the 10 biggest cities on the USA, broadband is still unavailable to a majority, ambulance times are in hours, and school funding is increasingly disappearing. Please keep in your minds and hearts that there are millions people outside the expected social systems generally assumed available to city and suburb dwellers.
- xor1 9y ago
  California on its own has a huge amount of disparity. I'm only familiar with the SF/Bay/LA/OC/SD bubbles, since that's where I've spent (and continue to spend) my entire life. I can't even name more than a few counties, and I can barely name any cities outside of those counties. The rest of California that isn't bordering any of these regions may as well be another country to me.
  - daodedickinson 9y ago
    Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford's Hoover Institute has been the leading writer on this topic for years; this is his latest: https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/california-21st-century-wild-west/ https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/california-21st-centur...
  - Roboprog 9y ago
    If you want to see “Appalachia West”, drive north on I-5 until you get to Bakersfield, then take CA-99 from Bakersfield to Sacramento. Well, from the LA area, anyway. Or from SF go east on I-80 to Sac, then south on CA-99. It’s a different world than the coastal cities. (Much like you said, but that’s the route, anyway) Sacramento itself is a kind of borderland, despite being the capitol.
- bequanna 9y ago
  > ... ambulance times are in hours Where? I live in an very remote part of Northern Minnesota. Even so, worst case ambulance time to most people in my area would be 15-20 mins. I would argue that an incredibly small portion of the US population lives >1hr from an ambulance or first responder.
ryandrake 9y ago
> A third of rural whites, and 40 percent of rural white men, are resigned to believing that their children will grow up with a lower standard of living than they did I always thought this was a given, and am surprised a significant number of people believe otherwise. Aren’t the Baby Boomers the last generation alive today that will on average have a better standard of living than their parents? Starting with Gen X, I’ve always believed that we have higher overall levels of debt, including student debt, less saved for retirement, less job security, less home ownership opportunity, lower expected lifetime earnings adjusted for inflation...
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  I haven't been able to find an objective measure of standard of living on a generational basis, but according to Pew, people in general believe theirs will be as good if not better than their parents. This contrasts with the belief that rural Americans have. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/chapter-4-standard-of-living/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/chapter-4-standard...
- skybrian 9y ago
  Even if it's true on average, it certainly doesn't need to be true for any given family.
- gowld 9y ago
  we also have higher productivity and technological advancement, which counteracts at least part of decreases in income / increases in debt.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Aren’t the Baby Boomers the last generation alive today that will on average have a better standard of living than their parents? Probably not. Gen X was predicted to be the first to do worse than their parents, but subsequently the Millennials were also predicted to be the first to (so I assume it hasn't turned out that way, on average, for GenX, or maybe GenX just got forgotten again as always seems to happen.) OTOH, the post-Millenial generation (GenZ) is already near near the age at which the GenX and Millennials predictions were first made, and I haven't heard anyone predicting it will happen/continue with them. And the post-post-Millenial generation is alive today, so in any case it's probably pretty presumptuous to say that the Baby Boomers will be the last generation to be alive today to do anything except, I dunno, grow up without computers.
brandmeyer 9y ago
"Overall, 59 percent of rural high school grads — white and nonwhite, at every income level — go to college the subsequent fall. That's a lower proportion than the 62 percent of urban and 67 percent of suburban graduates, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, which tracks this." That's not actually all that large of a difference. Its certainly not enough to justify the strong wording in the headline.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Yeah, and this "subsequent fall" thing is misleading at best. It would be more interesting to wait a couple of years to see about the percentages of those who have dropped out and have education debt but no degree to show for it. Is the problem that rural people are less likely to get screwed by the education cartel?
- johnny313 9y ago
  I think the more telling statistic was a bit further into the article: "Forty-two percent of people ages 18 to 24 are enrolled in all of higher education, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, but only 29 percent of rural people in that age group are enrolled, compared with nearly 48 percent from cities."
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - lugg 9y ago
    Is that people from rural areas or just people in rural areas? Because less people in higher education in rural areas shouldn't suprise anyone. People generally move or commute to cities for higher education and that isn't really news. So depending what those numbers really mean could be significant.
    - hateduser2 9y ago
      Whether or not it’s surprising is kind of besides the point no? It’s still a problem and to get it fixed the first step is to draw attention to it.
vanilla_nut 9y ago
As a graduate of a very rural American school (to give you an idea, my entire pre-k through 12th grade school was housed in a single building, with below 500 kids total; my graduating class was just over 30 students, and I was one of 3 who went on to a 4-year school -- fewer than 10 of us went to any college at all)... this article isn't very good. Like some other commenters have pointed out, the author failed to interview any rural teens besides a single college student -- the rest of the article is just listing statistics, which isn't inherently bad, but doesn't give us much of an idea of why rural teens aren't attending college. In my anecdotal experience, the reason in simple: parents in rural areas don't value a college education (probably because many of them never attended college themselves, opting for blue collar work instead), and thus don't encourage their kids to attend college. Throughout my childhood, kids seemed to glorify blue collar work and even look down on white collar workers; I recall being bullied quite a bit because my parents were educated and encouraged me to work hard in school. That might be common behaviour in a lot of schools, but it was especially demoralizing in my case because I had no friends my age who valued education. And even if I did, before I turned 16 I wouldn't have been able to see them outside of school anyway, since both of my parents worked, I couldn't drive, and most students in my class lived at least 10 miles from my house over largely 60mph speed limit country roads -- not to mention the brutal winters in my area which would prevent even the shortest biking or walking travel. Without peers to learn alongside, I'll admit that my motivation to educate myself suffered. An even bigger problem was the lack of opportunities in my area: by the time I reached senior year of high school, I had literally one class left to take with a teacher at my school (Calc I, a class some of my college friends took their freshman year of high school). Instead, I opted to take classes at the local community college my senior year... but since I wasn't technically a high school graduate yet, I was forced to pay full sticker price (maybe 2k for the year?) out of my own pocket -- not a very good way to encourage students to aim high. Besides the lack of opportunity and the lack of motivated peers, it was also incredibly crushing to apply to schools and constantly miss out on programs designed to give underprivileged students a leg up simply because I'm not in their target demographics. Both of my parents worked 40+ hour weeks, yet my family was only barely middle class -- which actually made my life harder when I applied for financial aid, since the government expected me to come up with 20k a year out of pocket, since I didn't qualify as poor enough to warrant better aid. And when I finally got to my college, most students started ahead of me in introductory classes since my high school didn't offer any AP or IB classes. Based on my experience, I wouldn't recommend anybody bring up their kids in a rural area in America. You're effectively trading a childhood of enriching experiences for slightly cheaper rent and less traffic.
spiznnx 9y ago
Is this even a little surprising? Most people I know aspire to similar career paths as their parents, or adults around them in high school. If the careers of adults who are around you growing up didn't require college, why would you go?
- randomdata 9y ago
  Plus, getting a job is a numbers game. While there are, in absolute numbers, more jobs in large population areas, there are many more people wanting to have those jobs. When you are competing against 100 other people for a particular job, you need something special to set yourself apart in order to gain the attention of the employer. A college degree, especially before it became popular to get one, was seen as a highly distinguishing feature. When you are in a community that only has 100 people in total, you might be the only person who applies for the job, guaranteeing you the spot no matter what your background is.
bluedino 9y ago
Forget colleges - I would guess a higher number of rural area citizens are doing skilled jobs like welding or diesel repair than in cities.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
If you live in a city, you can likely attend a college from your parents' house. For those of us in rural areas, that is not even remotely true. If you intend to attend college, but live in a rural area, you have to prepare for all the expenses of living on your own, on top of quickly rising college expenses. You need a place to live, a budget for food, possibly even transportation. There is also a general wealth disparity, since the cost of living in urban areas is generally higher, wages in urban areas are generally higher. Because of this, the average (mode) person in a rural area has a much lower income than the average person in an urban area. In a country where education is leaving people in lifelong debt, it's not surprising that those of us who are born in rural areas are left behind.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Many colleges have a 'parietal rule' where Freshmen must live in a dorm. So maybe not so different.
  - BrooklynRage 9y ago
    Most public schools have a commuter option that lets you get out of that requirement if you can prove residency somewhere nearby.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Colleges tend to make it very easy to live in a new area, though. It's a problem that they've had to deal with for centuries, and one that they tend to be very sensitive towards. There are dormitories and meal plans, but those can be expensive. For the frugal, most universities have their own small housing departments which help students find safe and affordable housing in the area. But maybe there's a bit of a personality thing in how people view the experience. My grandmother, for example, cannot understand why I don't feel a strong connection and pull towards the land that I was born on. Whereas I cannot understand why anyone would.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    Yes, that is true, and it does help, but it doesn't make it as easy for someone from a rural area to go to college as it is for someone in an urban area. My point is there are a lot of factors, and a lot of bias that keep a small, but significant portion of rural youth out of college. Let's not act like these factors don't exist because we take some action to counteract them.
diogenescynic 9y ago
Well, they keep screwing themselves over the way they vote so I hardly feel bad for them. If you can’t get informed and vote in your own self-interest then I don’t know how I can possible he’ll fix your problems. Maybe they should take their own advice and pull themselves up by their bootstraps!
throwaway0255 9y ago
Most jobs don't require higher education. Most jobs that do require higher education don't actually make any use of the higher education. Are people who didn't follow the author up the ivory tower all failures who just fell through the cracks? What if some people are perfectly happy working in HVAC? These articles are always so condescending. The position that all people should by default go to college and that people who don't are lesser-than and fell through the cracks, is incredibly condescending and ignorant. After interviewing and working with hundreds of people, I can't even tell the difference between people who have a degree and people who don't. I'm often surprised when I look. It definitely seems like a lot of graduates don't actually learn or retain much of anything, or the curriculum isn't applicable to anything after they graduate and quickly atrophies away. I don't think colleges are about learning or skills anymore; they're a place where you pay an ever-growing amount of money to compete for a higher position in the social hierarchy, or to obtain government-mandated paper credentials for a specialized position you want. A lot of the students I've talked to are contemptuous of the entire process, and have no moral qualms whatsoever with cheating and cramming their way through it. They see it as a series of pointless hoops they're being made to jump through. People who really want to learn or develop a skill seem to do it much more effectively elsewhere, and this seems to even be true of actively enrolled college students themselves. I don't see college as something we need more of. It's an inefficiency in our system left over from a time when technical limitations gave colleges a monopoly on knowledge. We shouldn't be trying to expand its reach, we should be trying to replace it entirely with something less costly and more accessible. The biggest hurdle are the incumbents who've already bought their status, and unfortunately they do also happen to have most of the power, so their position is safe for now. But I think people are finally starting to see through these clothes.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Can you quote the part that you feel is condescending? The text of the article seems largely straightforward and factual to me. It doesn’t say that there’s anything inherently bad about not going to college, but rather that not having a college degree has made it difficult for some people to find new careers in places where many types of labor are facing declining demand because of large structural forces, and that those communities are feeling a general malaise due to drug use, high unemployment, outward migration, falling incomes, etc. (a claim supported by evidence from polls and census data). Are you saying that it is condescending for the “executive director of the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative” to be advising rural students to try college? Is it wrong for people from rural areas who got college degrees to spend their time advocating that other rural young people do the same? I know several people who grew up in rural places and founding college and subsequent highly technical careers very rewarding. For some, it was explicitly seen as a way to escape their (to them, stifling feeling) rural community. I also know people who grew up in a city but didn’t like it and moved to rural areas as adults. Different people have different preferences. If you are arguing that many jobs that currently require degrees shouldn’t, that seems like an orthogonal conversation not really touched on by this article; it’s not at all clear that the people profiled here would disagree with that.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
This author takes for granted that rural students are politically compatible with college campuses. They're not. All the barriers to attending and graduating college are severely aggravated when the people you'll be around at college do not share and cannot relate to your life experiences or values and a significant fraction of whom will see you as a backwards hick.
- gnicholas 9y ago
  I was also surprised that the article didn't address this very real issue. It started to talk about the "cultural" aspect, but it didn't mention politics except to note that rural areas were more pro-Trump than suburban areas. Bizarre that the author didn't put 2 and 2 together and consider that perhaps people who chose Trump over Clinton might not want to go to mostly-liberal ivory towers.
dizzystar 9y ago
I knew a teacher in a rural town. She had to raise funds just to buy books, paper, pencils, or anything else for the students to use. The whole operation was on donation. Society gives up on the kids, the kids give up on society.
- kasey_junk 9y ago
  That is not a rural only situation. Education funding is an issue lots of places.
wemdyjreichert 9y ago
Not everybody needs to go to college. Everybody doing this drives up prices, makes it less meaningful, and almost obligates many students to spend even more on grad school.
orionblastar 9y ago
I learned programming by myself at age 12 on a Commodore 64, in modern times kids get a tablet for school that cost almost as much as the Commodore 64 and 1541 drive cost me. Tablets have caused Toys r Us and others to go out of business. You see I learned science from some of the toys my parents bought me, Legos, Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, board games, etc. When I went UMR and joined a fraternity there I already had memorized Trivia Pursuit cards from my younger years. You don't need college to learn how to program, there are classes on the Internet.
Animats 9y ago
Overall, 59 percent of rural high school grads — white and nonwhite, at every income level — go to college the subsequent fall. That's a lower proportion than the 62 percent of urban and 67 percent of suburban graduates... That's not a huge difference.
Aoyagi 9y ago
Perhaps if there wasn't such an irrational push for everyone to attend and finish college, it wouldn't be a problem...
Taylor_OD 9y ago
I grew up in Vermont. Throwing very rough numbers out here but 30% of my graduating high school class went to college, 40% joined some branch of the military, and 30% are still living in the same town. I don't love the military and the way we use it as a country but it does provide a lot of people an alternative to college and a way to get out.
- SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
  If you really work the system, the military can be an EXCELLENT opportunity. Likewise, if you need structure, they’ll certainly give it to you. Some people go in without a plan, do 4-6 years and get out just as aimless as we went in, but by now they are grown and the responsibility for their lives is entirely their own. It’s like trade school, or coding boot camp, or college, you get out what you put in.
  - Taylor_OD 9y ago
    Absolutely. Of my friends who did join I can only think of one or two who have really done very well for themselves. However all the rest are still better off than my friends who stayed in their small town.
8bitsrule 9y ago
I'm seeing the old familiar refrain that going to college is about job training. There are many reasons to go to college, that's just one of them. There are many reasons apart from the mind-sharpening and focussing skills learned in classrooms. Getting to know people unlike those you grew up with is one. Socializing. Networking. Exposure to many points of view. Exposure to history, culture, ideas. And on and on. Exposure to kinds of work that you would otherwise never know existed. Work is what you do so you -can- live. Life is what you do outside of work. In college you can learn about ALL of your opportunities. People who just go to college to close-mindedly garner a skillset they think they need are cheating themselves out of the big picture. Noone can tell you what you -really- want to do. You have to figure that out yourself. Else you're just better-trained to do something else. Tragic.

257 points by jofer 9y ago

My Scouts from a rural community are largely not college-bound. Some do community college for a year or two; some enter the military. Most others get a certificate and work at contracting/construction/electrician type jobs. They do well. One bright bookish young man was an exception. My wife heard he was discouraged about college, so she researched and came up with a program to send qualified rural students to college. He's at Auburn, at little or no cost to his family now. But he was an exception.

matthewwiese 9y ago
Lovely to hear that your wife had the wherewithal to do that! As an Eagle Scout myself it always puts a smile on my face when I hear about a Scout finding success (after having worked to earn it). The program did a lot for developing my charisma and work ethic, not to mention the lasting friendships I have til this day. There are certainly gold nuggets hidden under all that fetishistic patriotism and religious handwringing. Much luck to him. From one Scout to another. :)

forkLding 9y ago

Theres also the concern if you're not really doing a STEM subject that has high career prospects, its not really worth it to take on student debt from college only to graduate without a stable career. I think this may also be a concern to people from rural areas who can have livable careers without college.

watwut 9y ago
Rural areas tend to be poorest as far as whites go. They are not full of great jobs.
- forkLding 9y ago
  Agreed, however living and housing costs tend to be low, so relatively speaking, with a not-so-great job, can still have a livable career.
  - gowld 9y ago
    If the finances balanced like this, Ii's unlikely that cities would be such popular destinations for young adults. I expect you'd find that the missing income is even greater than the savings in costs of living.
    - dorchadas 9y ago
      I dunno. I think there's more to the draw of cities. Like, I personally know I'm saving less living in a "city" than I could be living in my hometown... But, there's a lot more to do, it's a lot more culturally diverse, etc etc. I value that more than the extra money I could be saving. I'm willing to bet others value things like that, as well as the career opportunities, that come with cities.
    - jschwartzi 9y ago
      Or they do balance like this but the opportunities you miss out on as a young person are worth far more to you than the cost of living. That's certainly how it worked for me. I could have lived off $20.00/hr in the rural area I grew up in, but I would be isolated or stuck going to church for all of my social interactions. In the city I can't live comfortably off less than $30.00 but other people are right outside my door.
  - Slansitartop 9y ago
    But college costs the same for everyone. On average, I see more expensive cars in the Bay Area than I do in my home state. I suspect that's because they're proportionally cheaper to someone who can afford to live there.
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
UncleMeat 9y ago
This is a risk, like anything else. But in aggregate college graduates make far more money than non-graduates, much more than would offset even the crazy tuition today.

VLM 9y ago

Fascinating that culturally the author couldn't bring himself to talk to the kids. The only kid he talked to was one of the unusual college attendees. Kind of shocking if you think about it. He repeated a lot of narrative from numerous professional axe grinders, but nothing can really be learned from that. It wasn't a story about the rural kids who don't go to college, it was a story about politicians axe grinding where the claimed subject was never considered; could have been a story "about" Bolivian tin exports or farm subsidies for all the subject mattered to the discussion. An analysis mode the author didn't consider is time. The rate of attendance has increased dramatically over time. Attendance is a little less than 10% lower for rural kids, and google nearly instantly found a graph of college attendance per year indicating the rate has been increasing at a fairly linear rate of a bit less than five percent per decade, so rural kids are not living in a dystopia as much as they're living in roughly the early 00s. Not a bad time to live, really. Culturally I'm sure there are variations in attitude in various areas and having 2005 cultural attitudes in the year 2018 isn't really much of an issue especially if your friends family neighbors and employer have attitudes that are significantly pre-2005 anyway. An interesting analysis mode is comparing supply and demand. According to the linked Washington Post article below, only 27% of college grads in America work in a job closely related to their degree, and "The chances of finding a job related to your degree or major go up a few points if you move to a big city". The kids might be intelligent enough to see that taking out a home mortgage sized student loan to get a degree that will not lead to gainful employment is a poor investment. The article further states only 62 percent of grads had a job that requiring a degree. You can hand wave a lot, but around 4/5 of rural kids are throwing money away if they go to college. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/20/only-27-percent-of-college-grads-have-a-job-related-to-their-major https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/20/only-... The advice on HN usually skews toward advice for SAT score recipients above 1475 points or so... please remember this is a discussion about 100% of American kids not the 1%. Based on the numbers, college was a waste of money for somewhere between one third and three quarters of attendees, so rural kids not wasting money on a bad investment is not exactly a crisis.

watwut 9y ago
College grads do better then those who did not went to college - in terms of earnings, home ownership and just about any other stat I have seen. They do worst then grads of previous generation through. The worst off are those who took debt and then dropped out. Picking up grads as argument against college is odd, given that their results are not as bad as results of other demographic groups.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

nugi 9y ago

The world continues to focus on cities, while the rest of the people are left behind. I notice a clear metropolitan bias on HN, often incredulous that 1st world citizens are still living in a unimproved state. Even an 30min from one of the 10 biggest cities on the USA, broadband is still unavailable to a majority, ambulance times are in hours, and school funding is increasingly disappearing. Please keep in your minds and hearts that there are millions people outside the expected social systems generally assumed available to city and suburb dwellers.

xor1 9y ago
California on its own has a huge amount of disparity. I'm only familiar with the SF/Bay/LA/OC/SD bubbles, since that's where I've spent (and continue to spend) my entire life. I can't even name more than a few counties, and I can barely name any cities outside of those counties. The rest of California that isn't bordering any of these regions may as well be another country to me.
- daodedickinson 9y ago
  Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford's Hoover Institute has been the leading writer on this topic for years; this is his latest: https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/california-21st-century-wild-west/ https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/california-21st-centur...
- Roboprog 9y ago
  If you want to see “Appalachia West”, drive north on I-5 until you get to Bakersfield, then take CA-99 from Bakersfield to Sacramento. Well, from the LA area, anyway. Or from SF go east on I-80 to Sac, then south on CA-99. It’s a different world than the coastal cities. (Much like you said, but that’s the route, anyway) Sacramento itself is a kind of borderland, despite being the capitol.
bequanna 9y ago
> ... ambulance times are in hours Where? I live in an very remote part of Northern Minnesota. Even so, worst case ambulance time to most people in my area would be 15-20 mins. I would argue that an incredibly small portion of the US population lives >1hr from an ambulance or first responder.

ryandrake 9y ago

> A third of rural whites, and 40 percent of rural white men, are resigned to believing that their children will grow up with a lower standard of living than they did I always thought this was a given, and am surprised a significant number of people believe otherwise. Aren’t the Baby Boomers the last generation alive today that will on average have a better standard of living than their parents? Starting with Gen X, I’ve always believed that we have higher overall levels of debt, including student debt, less saved for retirement, less job security, less home ownership opportunity, lower expected lifetime earnings adjusted for inflation...

Godel_unicode 9y ago
I haven't been able to find an objective measure of standard of living on a generational basis, but according to Pew, people in general believe theirs will be as good if not better than their parents. This contrasts with the belief that rural Americans have. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/chapter-4-standard-of-living/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/chapter-4-standard...
skybrian 9y ago
Even if it's true on average, it certainly doesn't need to be true for any given family.
gowld 9y ago
we also have higher productivity and technological advancement, which counteracts at least part of decreases in income / increases in debt.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Aren’t the Baby Boomers the last generation alive today that will on average have a better standard of living than their parents? Probably not. Gen X was predicted to be the first to do worse than their parents, but subsequently the Millennials were also predicted to be the first to (so I assume it hasn't turned out that way, on average, for GenX, or maybe GenX just got forgotten again as always seems to happen.) OTOH, the post-Millenial generation (GenZ) is already near near the age at which the GenX and Millennials predictions were first made, and I haven't heard anyone predicting it will happen/continue with them. And the post-post-Millenial generation is alive today, so in any case it's probably pretty presumptuous to say that the Baby Boomers will be the last generation to be alive today to do anything except, I dunno, grow up without computers.

brandmeyer 9y ago

"Overall, 59 percent of rural high school grads — white and nonwhite, at every income level — go to college the subsequent fall. That's a lower proportion than the 62 percent of urban and 67 percent of suburban graduates, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, which tracks this." That's not actually all that large of a difference. Its certainly not enough to justify the strong wording in the headline.

jessaustin 9y ago
Yeah, and this "subsequent fall" thing is misleading at best. It would be more interesting to wait a couple of years to see about the percentages of those who have dropped out and have education debt but no degree to show for it. Is the problem that rural people are less likely to get screwed by the education cartel?
johnny313 9y ago
I think the more telling statistic was a bit further into the article: "Forty-two percent of people ages 18 to 24 are enrolled in all of higher education, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, but only 29 percent of rural people in that age group are enrolled, compared with nearly 48 percent from cities."
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lugg 9y ago
  Is that people from rural areas or just people in rural areas? Because less people in higher education in rural areas shouldn't suprise anyone. People generally move or commute to cities for higher education and that isn't really news. So depending what those numbers really mean could be significant.
  - hateduser2 9y ago
    Whether or not it’s surprising is kind of besides the point no? It’s still a problem and to get it fixed the first step is to draw attention to it.

vanilla_nut 9y ago

As a graduate of a very rural American school (to give you an idea, my entire pre-k through 12th grade school was housed in a single building, with below 500 kids total; my graduating class was just over 30 students, and I was one of 3 who went on to a 4-year school -- fewer than 10 of us went to any college at all)... this article isn't very good. Like some other commenters have pointed out, the author failed to interview any rural teens besides a single college student -- the rest of the article is just listing statistics, which isn't inherently bad, but doesn't give us much of an idea of why rural teens aren't attending college. In my anecdotal experience, the reason in simple: parents in rural areas don't value a college education (probably because many of them never attended college themselves, opting for blue collar work instead), and thus don't encourage their kids to attend college. Throughout my childhood, kids seemed to glorify blue collar work and even look down on white collar workers; I recall being bullied quite a bit because my parents were educated and encouraged me to work hard in school. That might be common behaviour in a lot of schools, but it was especially demoralizing in my case because I had no friends my age who valued education. And even if I did, before I turned 16 I wouldn't have been able to see them outside of school anyway, since both of my parents worked, I couldn't drive, and most students in my class lived at least 10 miles from my house over largely 60mph speed limit country roads -- not to mention the brutal winters in my area which would prevent even the shortest biking or walking travel. Without peers to learn alongside, I'll admit that my motivation to educate myself suffered. An even bigger problem was the lack of opportunities in my area: by the time I reached senior year of high school, I had literally one class left to take with a teacher at my school (Calc I, a class some of my college friends took their freshman year of high school). Instead, I opted to take classes at the local community college my senior year... but since I wasn't technically a high school graduate yet, I was forced to pay full sticker price (maybe 2k for the year?) out of my own pocket -- not a very good way to encourage students to aim high. Besides the lack of opportunity and the lack of motivated peers, it was also incredibly crushing to apply to schools and constantly miss out on programs designed to give underprivileged students a leg up simply because I'm not in their target demographics. Both of my parents worked 40+ hour weeks, yet my family was only barely middle class -- which actually made my life harder when I applied for financial aid, since the government expected me to come up with 20k a year out of pocket, since I didn't qualify as poor enough to warrant better aid. And when I finally got to my college, most students started ahead of me in introductory classes since my high school didn't offer any AP or IB classes. Based on my experience, I wouldn't recommend anybody bring up their kids in a rural area in America. You're effectively trading a childhood of enriching experiences for slightly cheaper rent and less traffic.

spiznnx 9y ago

Is this even a little surprising? Most people I know aspire to similar career paths as their parents, or adults around them in high school. If the careers of adults who are around you growing up didn't require college, why would you go?

randomdata 9y ago
Plus, getting a job is a numbers game. While there are, in absolute numbers, more jobs in large population areas, there are many more people wanting to have those jobs. When you are competing against 100 other people for a particular job, you need something special to set yourself apart in order to gain the attention of the employer. A college degree, especially before it became popular to get one, was seen as a highly distinguishing feature. When you are in a community that only has 100 people in total, you might be the only person who applies for the job, guaranteeing you the spot no matter what your background is.

bluedino 9y ago

Forget colleges - I would guess a higher number of rural area citizens are doing skilled jobs like welding or diesel repair than in cities.

thomastjeffery 9y ago

If you live in a city, you can likely attend a college from your parents' house. For those of us in rural areas, that is not even remotely true. If you intend to attend college, but live in a rural area, you have to prepare for all the expenses of living on your own, on top of quickly rising college expenses. You need a place to live, a budget for food, possibly even transportation. There is also a general wealth disparity, since the cost of living in urban areas is generally higher, wages in urban areas are generally higher. Because of this, the average (mode) person in a rural area has a much lower income than the average person in an urban area. In a country where education is leaving people in lifelong debt, it's not surprising that those of us who are born in rural areas are left behind.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
Many colleges have a 'parietal rule' where Freshmen must live in a dorm. So maybe not so different.
- BrooklynRage 9y ago
  Most public schools have a commuter option that lets you get out of that requirement if you can prove residency somewhere nearby.
leggomylibro 9y ago
Colleges tend to make it very easy to live in a new area, though. It's a problem that they've had to deal with for centuries, and one that they tend to be very sensitive towards. There are dormitories and meal plans, but those can be expensive. For the frugal, most universities have their own small housing departments which help students find safe and affordable housing in the area. But maybe there's a bit of a personality thing in how people view the experience. My grandmother, for example, cannot understand why I don't feel a strong connection and pull towards the land that I was born on. Whereas I cannot understand why anyone would.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  Yes, that is true, and it does help, but it doesn't make it as easy for someone from a rural area to go to college as it is for someone in an urban area. My point is there are a lot of factors, and a lot of bias that keep a small, but significant portion of rural youth out of college. Let's not act like these factors don't exist because we take some action to counteract them.

diogenescynic 9y ago

Well, they keep screwing themselves over the way they vote so I hardly feel bad for them. If you can’t get informed and vote in your own self-interest then I don’t know how I can possible he’ll fix your problems. Maybe they should take their own advice and pull themselves up by their bootstraps!

throwaway0255 9y ago

Most jobs don't require higher education. Most jobs that do require higher education don't actually make any use of the higher education. Are people who didn't follow the author up the ivory tower all failures who just fell through the cracks? What if some people are perfectly happy working in HVAC? These articles are always so condescending. The position that all people should by default go to college and that people who don't are lesser-than and fell through the cracks, is incredibly condescending and ignorant. After interviewing and working with hundreds of people, I can't even tell the difference between people who have a degree and people who don't. I'm often surprised when I look. It definitely seems like a lot of graduates don't actually learn or retain much of anything, or the curriculum isn't applicable to anything after they graduate and quickly atrophies away. I don't think colleges are about learning or skills anymore; they're a place where you pay an ever-growing amount of money to compete for a higher position in the social hierarchy, or to obtain government-mandated paper credentials for a specialized position you want. A lot of the students I've talked to are contemptuous of the entire process, and have no moral qualms whatsoever with cheating and cramming their way through it. They see it as a series of pointless hoops they're being made to jump through. People who really want to learn or develop a skill seem to do it much more effectively elsewhere, and this seems to even be true of actively enrolled college students themselves. I don't see college as something we need more of. It's an inefficiency in our system left over from a time when technical limitations gave colleges a monopoly on knowledge. We shouldn't be trying to expand its reach, we should be trying to replace it entirely with something less costly and more accessible. The biggest hurdle are the incumbents who've already bought their status, and unfortunately they do also happen to have most of the power, so their position is safe for now. But I think people are finally starting to see through these clothes.

jacobolus 9y ago
Can you quote the part that you feel is condescending? The text of the article seems largely straightforward and factual to me. It doesn’t say that there’s anything inherently bad about not going to college, but rather that not having a college degree has made it difficult for some people to find new careers in places where many types of labor are facing declining demand because of large structural forces, and that those communities are feeling a general malaise due to drug use, high unemployment, outward migration, falling incomes, etc. (a claim supported by evidence from polls and census data). Are you saying that it is condescending for the “executive director of the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative” to be advising rural students to try college? Is it wrong for people from rural areas who got college degrees to spend their time advocating that other rural young people do the same? I know several people who grew up in rural places and founding college and subsequent highly technical careers very rewarding. For some, it was explicitly seen as a way to escape their (to them, stifling feeling) rural community. I also know people who grew up in a city but didn’t like it and moved to rural areas as adults. Different people have different preferences. If you are arguing that many jobs that currently require degrees shouldn’t, that seems like an orthogonal conversation not really touched on by this article; it’s not at all clear that the people profiled here would disagree with that.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

This author takes for granted that rural students are politically compatible with college campuses. They're not. All the barriers to attending and graduating college are severely aggravated when the people you'll be around at college do not share and cannot relate to your life experiences or values and a significant fraction of whom will see you as a backwards hick.

gnicholas 9y ago
I was also surprised that the article didn't address this very real issue. It started to talk about the "cultural" aspect, but it didn't mention politics except to note that rural areas were more pro-Trump than suburban areas. Bizarre that the author didn't put 2 and 2 together and consider that perhaps people who chose Trump over Clinton might not want to go to mostly-liberal ivory towers.

dizzystar 9y ago

I knew a teacher in a rural town. She had to raise funds just to buy books, paper, pencils, or anything else for the students to use. The whole operation was on donation. Society gives up on the kids, the kids give up on society.

kasey_junk 9y ago
That is not a rural only situation. Education funding is an issue lots of places.

wemdyjreichert 9y ago

Not everybody needs to go to college. Everybody doing this drives up prices, makes it less meaningful, and almost obligates many students to spend even more on grad school.

orionblastar 9y ago

I learned programming by myself at age 12 on a Commodore 64, in modern times kids get a tablet for school that cost almost as much as the Commodore 64 and 1541 drive cost me. Tablets have caused Toys r Us and others to go out of business. You see I learned science from some of the toys my parents bought me, Legos, Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, board games, etc. When I went UMR and joined a fraternity there I already had memorized Trivia Pursuit cards from my younger years. You don't need college to learn how to program, there are classes on the Internet.

Animats 9y ago

Overall, 59 percent of rural high school grads — white and nonwhite, at every income level — go to college the subsequent fall. That's a lower proportion than the 62 percent of urban and 67 percent of suburban graduates... That's not a huge difference.

Aoyagi 9y ago

Perhaps if there wasn't such an irrational push for everyone to attend and finish college, it wouldn't be a problem...

Taylor_OD 9y ago

I grew up in Vermont. Throwing very rough numbers out here but 30% of my graduating high school class went to college, 40% joined some branch of the military, and 30% are still living in the same town. I don't love the military and the way we use it as a country but it does provide a lot of people an alternative to college and a way to get out.

SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
If you really work the system, the military can be an EXCELLENT opportunity. Likewise, if you need structure, they’ll certainly give it to you. Some people go in without a plan, do 4-6 years and get out just as aimless as we went in, but by now they are grown and the responsibility for their lives is entirely their own. It’s like trade school, or coding boot camp, or college, you get out what you put in.
- Taylor_OD 9y ago
  Absolutely. Of my friends who did join I can only think of one or two who have really done very well for themselves. However all the rest are still better off than my friends who stayed in their small town.

8bitsrule 9y ago

I'm seeing the old familiar refrain that going to college is about job training. There are many reasons to go to college, that's just one of them. There are many reasons apart from the mind-sharpening and focussing skills learned in classrooms. Getting to know people unlike those you grew up with is one. Socializing. Networking. Exposure to many points of view. Exposure to history, culture, ideas. And on and on. Exposure to kinds of work that you would otherwise never know existed. Work is what you do so you -can- live. Life is what you do outside of work. In college you can learn about ALL of your opportunities. People who just go to college to close-mindedly garner a skillset they think they need are cheating themselves out of the big picture. Noone can tell you what you -really- want to do. You have to figure that out yourself. Else you're just better-trained to do something else. Tragic.