The article doesn't address a trend that I've noticed: You can't connect two trees together in the woods and make them talk. A lot of rural areas in the states

The article doesn't address a trend that I've noticed: You can't connect two trees together in the woods and make them talk. A lot of rural areas in the states owe their livelihoods, at least large swaths of it in the past, to other industries like oil or agriculture or the like. They are very "stuck in their ways", as the colloquialism goes, and seem loathed to adapt to the times - for varying and differing reasons. Depending on the typical political demographics of an area, this will also lend to whether or not there's public services available to incentivise people to move and/or live there - such a bus or train systems. (This also disincentivises the poor but that's a different soapbox for another day.) Large cities, in their parts, offer public services that rural areas (in the states) simply do not - the availability and viability of employment removed. If I were paying off a student loan debt, of course the higher wage[s] with the public services incentives are going to be more appealing. I don't have to own a car to get to work? Great! That's far less overhead that I have to deal with and allows more - theoretical - buffer cushion of assets to pay-off my loan[s] and/or live a comfortable life. This, of course, is discounting the simple fact that college loans have, themselves, grown disproportionately larger (compared to previous generations') and this is in large part due to the fact that universities can keep increasing the costs, indefinitely, because a college degree is no longer a commodity but a necessity for a lot of positions (experience can trump a degree in our field but this trend is decreasing). Not only this but because the loans are guaranteed by the government, the universities are getting paid - no matter what. I would expect, in the next 10 years, for people to start hitting $1M for their overall loans, simply because it's a choice between two perceived "evils": Debt and a "guaranteed future" or no debt and a perceived endless cycle of poverty. (Yes, I'm aware of trade skills and I'm not arguing for or against them, here, just noting that they are, for a large part, ignored in overall society.) I don't an answer to the problem but I can tell you that it's not a simple as student loan debt, when it comes to brain drain of rural areas. There are many other factors at play, the least of which (for our field), is that you can't work somewhere where the jobs simply do not exist. Someone would say "then make the jobs" but it is nowhere near that simple; especially, in rural America, where the proliferation of technology is still a remote possibility. For example, there are states that are so invested in other industries that they depend on the IX of other states (e.g.: Louisiana routing through SN) because they refuse to invest in building in the infrastructure in their own states. That's a reality that will, seemingly, never be addressed because it's the status quo.