Contributed by the Center for Rural Strategies
By Bill Bishop and Roberto
Gallardo
Clatsop County has experienced a brain gain in the last 40
years, joining the rest of the country in what has been a massive increase in
the number of adults who have earned college degrees.
In 1970, 8.8 percent of those
over 25 years of age had college degrees in Clatsop County. By 2010, 21.6
percent of adults here had completed college.
The percentage of adults with
college degrees in Clatsop County was less than the national average of 27.9
percent in 2010. The college-educated rate here was less than the Oregon average
of 28.6 percent.
The number of adults in the
United States with college degrees has nearly tripled since 1970, when only 10.7
percent of adults had graduated from college. But the percentage of adults with
degrees in counties with small cities, such as Clatsop County, while increasing,
has generally fallen behind the proportion of college-educated residents in
urban counties.
The loss of young,
well-educated residents has posed a long-standing difficulty for rural
communities.
“One of the problems that rural
areas face is that in order to get a college education, young people often have
to leave,” says Judith Stallmann, an economist at the University of Missouri.
“Once you leave, that introduces you to other opportunities that you might not
have seen had you not left.”
The good news for rural America
is that it has caught up in every other measure of
education.
In 1970, 7.8 percent of adults
in rural counties had some education after high school, but less than a college
degree. By 2010, 27.4 percent of rural adults had attained some post high school
education without earning a college diploma. That level of education was close
to the national average of 28.1 percent.
In Clatsop County, 11.7 percent
of adults had some college in 1970, rising to 40.4 percent in 2010. The Oregon
average in 2010 was 34.3 percent. Clatsop County had 16,755 adults (those over
25 years of age) in 1970 and 25,647 adults in 2010.
Overall, Stallmann says, the
trends show that “rural people have responded to the demand for increased job
skills by the increasing their post secondary education.”
Only 8.9 percent of the adult
population in Clatsop County had failed to graduate from high school in 2010.
Nationally 15 percent of adults had not completed high school; in Oregon, the
rate was 11.4 percent.
Mark
Partridge, a rural economist at Ohio State University, says that regional
differences in college graduation rates have increased in recent years.
Partridge said his studies have found that rural counties and counties with
small cities in the South and West didn’t fare as well as those in the Midwest
and Northeast in attracting college graduates. Even though the Sunbelt has seen
tremendous growth over the past few decades, the South’s rural counties haven’t
kept up in terms of attracting adults with college
degrees.
But
the problem of keeping college graduates in rural America is a national issue
and one that is also enduring.
Missouri economist Stallmann said this is a reflection
of the kinds of jobs that are generally available in rural communities. If there
are fewer jobs demanding college degrees in a community, there are likely to be
fewer college graduates.
“It’s
a big deal in a lot of rural counties because you don't see a lot of jobs that
require a college education," Stallmann said. Young people graduating from high
school don’t see many jobs that demand a college diploma, so they don’t think
about coming home once they leave for the university.
There
can be a “self-reinforcing cycle” in rural communities, Stallmann said — young
people leave to gain higher education, they don’t come back after college
because there aren’t jobs that demand such education, and their absence
diminishes the chances that more of these kinds of jobs will be
created.
Nationally, rural counties and counties with small
cities have caught up with urban counties in the percentage of adults who have
some post high school education. Stallmann sees this as a sign that “there are
perhaps more jobs in rural areas that require post secondary education but not
college.”
Both
Stallmann and Partridge said the data on college education rates told them that
rural communities should consider the kind of jobs being created
locally.
“Rural communities may need to think about the types of
jobs” being created, Stallmann said. “There are some communities that are doing
things like getting local businesses to put an emphasis on hiring local kids who
got a college education."
“It
really suggests that rural communities that aren't thinking about making
themselves attractive to educated people are really going to suffer,” Partridge
said.
Bill Bishop is co-editor of
the Daily Yonder (www.dailyyonder.com), an online news publication covering
rural America that is published by the Center for Rural Strategies. The Center
for Rural Strategies (www.ruralstrategies.org) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission
is to promote healthy civic discourse about rural
issues.
Roberto Gallardo is an
assistant extension professor at the Southern Rural Development Center at
Mississippi State University, (srdc.msstate.edu)
For the raw information
included in this story and charts, graphs and a map, visit this site:
http://www.dailyyonder.com/education-and-rural-america-data-page/2012/07/06/4165
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