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

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.

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-...

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.

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.

> 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...

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.