The Rural Brain Drain
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As much as I love living in Door County and writing about the people here and the problems we face, I can’t help but have this heavy sense that what we all love about this place is slipping away. Men and women long into retirement stay on boards and in local government because there’s nobody to take their place. School enrollments continue to plummet, and our tourism businesses search for help overseas because there are not enough young folks to go around anymore.
Good jobs are hard to come by, and our best and brightest leave town to find them. Even when they want to stay, they can only battle economics for so long before the cost of living here sends them afield. But our peninsula is not alone in facing this.
In their new book, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America, authors Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas study small towns in Iowa, many of them dying. I heard about it yesterday on Radio Times, a consistently good NPR program out of Philadelphia (a link to the interview with the authors is below). Some of their most interesting thoughts concern education, and specifically our desire to push everyone toward a university education. For small towns, it sends the next generation away, rarely to return. But worse, it sends many kids away from what could be a better path for them. The towns are hit by a multitude of debilitating forces – brain drain, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the crippling effect that large factory farming has had on small communities and a cherished way of life.
All too much of it sounded familiar.
More on the Rural Brain Drain
Do Nothing, and Nothing is What We’ll Get>>
Re-thinking Education: Focus on University Comes at Expense of Everyone Else>>
A Shrinking Population: Door County Losing Young Families>>
