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

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

#21
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural areas tend to be poorest as far as whites go. They are not full of great jobs.

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.

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.

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

#22

> 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,…

we also have higher productivity and technological advancement, which counteracts at least part of decreases in income / increases in debt.

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

#23

> 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,…

> 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.

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

#24
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural areas tend to be poorest as far as whites go. They are not full of great jobs.

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.

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.

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

#25

"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.

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."

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

#26

> 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 think the rural aspect is more important than the broad generational aspect. Rural areas have seen a great decline over the last several decades. City people of the same generation have had a different experience.

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

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Not necessarily. College X costs the same for everyone (modulo scholarships and grants), but Chadron State College (in Nebraska), say, probably doesn't cost as much as Stanford.

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

#28
post #12
post #6

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…

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.

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-centur...

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

#29
post #6

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…

Thirty minutes from a major city but ambulances take hours doesn't seem to make a ton of sense.

I can imagine scenarios where it might. Maybe that area is in a different service region (so they don't dispatch from the city) with a much lower ambulance density. If all the ambulances are busy and have long travel times, it's possible it could take more than an hour for one to free up for a new call.

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

#30
post #6

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…

> ... 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.

Here's a map of critical access hospitals, which are a pretty good proxy for rural emergency hospitals:

http://www.flexmonitoring.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/CAH...

It doesn't show larger hospitals, so it is hard to directly answer the question about access to emergency care, but it shows that there is quite wide geographic coverage. The map in this article shows that the gaps are just where you would expect, in the extraordinarily rural west:

https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/03/health/hospital-deserts/index...

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