Rural America's “brain drain”: How student debt is emptying small towns
cbsnews.com
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The person who starts life off in massive debt, or who knows they'll be homeless if they don't somehow come up with a pile of hundred-dollar-bills every month, or (as is often the case) both, is somebody who:
* doesn't write for leisure
* doesn't organize politically
* doesn't innovate except on things they get paid to research
* and (perhaps most importantly) doesn't start a competing company.
These are on average, of course. A few people will still manage to do those things (especially if they come from wealth) but on the whole such activity is reduced. God help you if you have a kid and want to, say, run for office. How do you plan to pay for childcare?
Meanwhile, they are a person who will work on the things incumbent holders of power (owners of large businesses) want them to work on, for the sake of enriching 1) those owners, 2) landlords, 3) People who bought houses decades ago.
The system of entirely manufactured housing shortages and crushing student debt is pretty handy for keeping your population doing just what you want it to do.
I think a lot of people would actually be better off starting life with nothing and living somewhere cheap rather than starting with -$50,000+ and a huge rent bill every month. After all, we have the internet. But too many people don't discover this until it's too late, and they are shackled with a lifetime of obligations.
I was lucky to graduate without student debt largely thanks to my parents. My wife was not. I have been far, far more free in my choices in life, including the choice to live somewhere cheap, than her.
> I think a lot of people would actually be better off starting life with nothing and living somewhere cheap
The question is how to do this while working in your preferred sector. It's not just the tech industry that seems tied to the sort of agglomeration economies you only get in big urbanized areas; large parts of the service sector are like this, too.
From what I understand, you can get out without debt here (norway). No tuition, low fees for books and things. Government stipend doens't need repaid, but you can take out a loan above that (common). Then move up north and work for some time. 10 years, I think? And I'm awfully sure that some countries won't have as much debt in that time simply because living expenses are lower and some folks are able to live with family while going to school for the 5-6 years it takes to get a masters.
It hardly matters on the distinction, though. It isn't like tuition in the US covers living expenses. Even if you are able to live in student housing, you don't get housing all year in many places - you might need to move yourself and your stuff out for anywhere between 2 weeks and 2 months. Whatever your loans for living costs are, at least they aren't higher due to tuition.
What does this mean? Asking as a European that might be missing something (compared to Canada for example) but doesn't realize it.
That softens the issue, but doesn't make class mobility easier.
The theory is, if your mortgage interest rate was X% but some other investment like the stock market had much higher returns, a sophisticated investor might want to take the money they would have spent on repaying the principal and instead put it into that better-performing investment, then after 20 years pay off the mortgage principal with said investment.
Post-financial-crisis rules were put in place that mean banks actually have to ensure you're _making_ that higher-performing investment.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/mortgages/swede...
And I can only speak from my own experience, but people here do seem to do more of the things I noted. With a month off a year and, frankly, knowing you won't die in a gutter if you lose your job, you can spend more time on music, writing, whatever. But that's pure anecdata.
Here's a nice example of where the Scandinavian countries clearly seem to have something in common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_lau...
I'm seeing a lot of "born in" (~100) next to the laureates in the US category. That doesn't diminish the achievements for US as a country.
It's a sports term. In sports, when you win, you win fair and square.
Also, you might have a 'home court advantage' if you're playing at home.
I don't see why Nobel prizes would be any different. There are always more people who deserve a prize than receive it.
So yes, you can have both.
The implication was clearly that the particular "home" advantage made the difference and without it the person wouldn't have won. And the comment sounded like "I'm not saying it was unfair but it was unfair".
P.S. In sports you usually play both home and away to even out that unfair advantage. Big one time matches might even be held on neutral ground for the same reason.
Let's not play on semantics here. It's common sense not to suggest something is fair but then imply someone's nationality made the difference. I'm not saying I know nationality doesn't make a difference when awarding a Nobel prize. Just that if it does, then it wasn't fair.
We tend to measure it by how much money it earns. I think we could get away from that.
I'm interested in new methods for thatching homes, for instance. Maybe I'll find a weave that helps oaten straw last twice as long. It would never produce a meaningful economic benefit, but it would still be an innovation that enriches humanity,
I mean, sure, if it's likely you are going to spend your life making very little money, then sure, avoiding debt at the outset should be paramount. But getting some education, for most people, is probably the strongest thing they can do to decrease the chances that they will spend their life making very little money. I would argue that the next biggest thing you can do is to surround yourself with people who are going the direction you want to go.
I think the social and personal development sides of a metropolis are also pretty great. If I want to, (and I do) I can spend all day around people who are smarter than I am. I mean, substitute in your own figure of merit; no matter what you value, if you are in a dense area, chances are, you can find a group of people you can surround yourself with who have a lot of it.
This isn't just because of the migration of people who are financially able into the cities... this is also because there are more people of any type that are within your reach; there's a much larger and more diverse pool of people from which to pick your friends. If you are the average of the three people you spend the most time with? you want to be in a dense area where you can choose three really amazing people.
My own impresison, as someone who makes a good living without a degree, is that where you live actually matters a lot more if you don't have a degree; the difference in sysadmin jobs between silicon valley and less dense places is absolutely huge; much greater than the difference, say, in doctor jobs or even software engineer jobs.
I mean, I personally think education is a great investment opportunity for the government; it's like those schools that give you an education and then take a bit of your income for a while, right? it seems like good free education would more than pay for itself.
But most people (or, at least most voting power) seem to disagree with me.
I have no idea what people are thinking, if they are at all. Work primarily matters when there are no opportunities. Zuckerberg isn't the hardest worker of his generation. He found one of the best opportunities.
But they're too damned expensive, and that's a manufactured situation. We intentionally decided that home prices rising faster than inflation is a good thing, and now we get the occasional lip service to "let's make housing more affordable" but _nobody_ has the guts to say "let's make housing CHEAP. Because basic shelter free of indentured servitude is good for humanity". Instead you get "well this building will have 100 market-rate units and 10 affordable ones so we get the odd token normie to assuage the guilt of everyone else living there. But you still get to vote against any meaningful increase in housing supply that addresses the core problem of 1000 people trying to fit in 100 homes."
So, if you make a lot of money, the city is great. If you don't make a lot of money, the city _would_ be great if you could actually afford to live there.
My personal opinion is that if you want to get approval to build an office building, part of that approval would be talking someone into building a similar number of housing units nearby. I mean, not that they should be owned by the same entity; most of us don't want our housing directly contingent on our employment, but you need to build offices and housing in sync, otherwise you get crazy traffic problems.
I do think that there is a chicken and egg problem here, and it's part of why we think it's so important to keep poor people in their houses as the place gentrifies; A poor person growing up in a rich city has massively more economic mobility than they'd have growing up in a small town.
Of course, you are right that it's hard to be poor in a big city; but if you can snag a rent controlled room, or your aunt's couch or whatever, it can be a good leg up.
In my case, graduating without debt was mostly due to the low tuition of New York state (SUNY) schools in the 80s. My tuition was $675/semester, and the minimum wage at the time was $3.35. That means in roughly 10 40 hour weeks over the summer, I could save enough for the year's tuition. Combine that with a 12hr/week job working in the computer labs and sysadmin'ing, and I could pay for my share of the rent & my car.
People talk about free tuition. But maybe we just need to get back to the middle ground of affordable tuition as measured by the minimum wage. Eg, put a cap on tuition so that it can't be more than X hours of work at a state's minimum wage.
By comparison, New York state spend $21,000 per pupil in public school (new york city this was $27k). This is higher than the national average of $11,000.
The cheapest state, Utah, still spent $6500 per pupil.
Your $3200 isn't going to touch it, so who picks up the rest of the bill?
To your last point, Society is going to pay in one way or another. We can subsidize tuition and benefit from an educated population, with greater innovation and culture that results; or we can have less growth, innovation, and poverty.
1) Students pay the full cost 2) The taxpayer pays the full cost 3) The cost is shared
You're arguing for the latter. The trouble is the latter goes from everything from 1 cent a semester to $full_tutition - 1cent per semester, it's an option that can appeal to everyone.
How much should the taxpayer pay? How much should the student?
Personally I like the UK system, where the student pays if they make it big (get a job for netflix earning $500k a year you repay your entire loan), but you don't repay if you get a job in the local nursing home wiping someone's arse.
It's not a popular position, with both the right wing and left wing parties arguing against it (the left wing parties saying that taxes should rise to pay for stockbrokers' tuition, the right wing parties saying that taxes should rise to pay for stockbrokers' tuition)
It's also good for laundering privilege ("we can't make my buddy's kid partner unless he went to a good school - otherwise it looks like nepotism!")
Remove the endless supply of money for relatively useless degrees and you’ll end the issue.
This is the best idea I've heard when it comes to the debate on education costs.
Overall, population centers are more economically productive. You have more people collected in a smaller space, so workers and industries can cooperate more effectively. Countries' levels of urbanization have and, to varying degrees, continue to have a strong correlation with their level of wealth. You have more goods and services available within a smaller area. Workers have more job opportunities.
Urbanization also has good environmental effects. It makes cleaner modes of transport, like trains and subways, much more feasible. Power and water has to travel a smaller distance (except for when people put cities in dumb locations with regards to water distribution, like LA). Dense countries tend to have a smaller carbon footprint compared to more rural countries with the same standards of living.
Basically, there's a lot to be gained by populations shifting from rural areas to the city. I'm not so sure why many are so eager to lament a shrinking rural population.
It's not. The same trend can be seen all over Europe, where student debt is a much smaller issue.
Personally, I think part of this is that they're urbanist in a way that US small towns almost never are: even cities of 5 or 10 or 20k here are highly walkable, moreso than US cities 10x the population size, with cute downtowns to boot.
But I don't think it draws from the larger point.
I'm not from the States, but I guess this is fairly universal:
Country-side living has it's benefits: The pace is usually lower, there's less pollution and things are delightfully silent. Personally I have no intention of ever moving into a densely populated area again.
Apart from that, there's a lot of local culture and customs that is slowly being lost as young people move away from rural areas and into population centres dominated by international pop-culture. There's also the problem with people in urban areas losing their touch with the outside world, living in a small bubble with no idea about how things work outside. This will, in the long run, result in a lot of knowledge being lost.
I was at dinner the other day with a friend who was born & raised in Asia and she argued that the romanticized view of village life is far less prevalent in Asia, where it is less a sign of morals and family values and more a sign of abject poverty and lack of education.
I'm not sure I buy her argument but I thought it was interesting that her reaction to having lived in America for a year and seeing these issues up close was, "We're used to it in Asia but they're not used to it in America so they get very upset that that's how the world works now."
It's easy to romanticise a rural area too and mourn knowledge being lost, but that simultaneously involves condemning kids to continue the same cycles as their parents maintaining traditions and practices with little motive behind it beyond it being the thing that was always done.
The small bubbles of rural areas are often far smaller and far more ignorant than densely populated areas too. I had no source of knowledge whatsoever as to how the rest of the world functioned until I moved away. There was basically no chance in hell I was going to be able to know what I might like to do with my life at 18.
One thing I never got with families who moved out of a city to live in a (much much bigger) house in the country was why they didn't factor the sheer amount of extra work that will be involved in expanding their child's worldview when out of school activities become slim-to-nonexistent.
If nothing else, I heard several different languages at Lidl and there seemed to have people from many different places. But Tullamore is still commutable to Dublin (if only just) and probably not as rural as you'r thinking.
If the tradeoff includes no change in income and not having to deal with the daily commute, I think the amount of additional time and money to spend with kids would be a huge positive. Most of the ones I know are doing a daily ~80 minute train journey (complete with panicked rush to get to the station for their particular train each morning)... I dunno how anyone can justify erasing that much time from every day of their lives, or how they can have the time to do anything with/for their kids.
But if I find myself cramming in to the Luas from Heuston to the Docklands in a few years, well, it'll be my comeuppance for wanting to own a home outright.
To be fair, having experienced the Irish culture for a larger part of three years, this sentiment doesn't seem - implicitly - limited to the rural areas. A cursory search on <insert your chosen search engine here> for things like "making friends in Ireland" will demonstrate this.
This isn't to discredit your entire premise about rural life in Ireland, as I've definitely noticed the trends you're speaking of but this particular facet isn't inherenly a symptom of rural life in Ireland but, rather, seems to be a symptom of the overall culture.
(Note: I'm not trying to speak ill of Ireland, whatsoever, just noting my own anecdotal observations compared to what you suggest.)
Outside of Dublin (which isn't that big in itself and has infrastructure issues that limit its potential as a city too), there's a pretty limited range of social options.
With any kind of remotely niche social option (e.g. community theatre) you'll probably be able to build enough of an audience for one small established group of people who all know each other (who may be very welcoming, but this is still intimidating to a newcomer) but there won't be enough to build a secondary option... there's a tendency for things to drift into a social endgame, maybe? I dunno if I'm being coherent...
As an example in my field, law school cost of attendance is approaching $100,000/year. People are graduating with almost a quarter million dollars in debt. That leaves almost no choice between a small town Midwestern law firm paying $40,000 indefinitely, and a Vault 100 firm paying $160,000 (or higher!) with guaranteed lockstep raises every year.
Sure. Some of those people would have competed for BIGLAW jobs before. But student loan debt is dispositive.
But on the other hand the people who have to make these decisions are 17 or 18 year old kids. Some of these kids will be impressively mature, most will not. Then it becomes a function of how well their parents know their way around the system and high tuition fees create a big hurdle. Then you get social selection and it’s counterproductive.
They have to take a gamble on their own learning and earning skills and the future state of the economy - the latter being something they have no control over, and realistically, no understanding of.
The reality is the system will collapse anyway within the next ten years, probably with significant economic wreckage, and the next generations will wonder why anyone ever thought it was a good idea.
Is social selection an unfortunate byproduct, or a deliberate goal?
Even if it's a choice between a small town firm in Mishawaka or Marquette versus $110,000-$120,000 in Indianapolis or Grand Rapids, it's still going to be a major thumb on the scale for people with outsized debt to move to the city.
More years of education => Higher likelihood to get a city job that pays well enough for a decent lifestyle
The above can explain the correlation between existence/level of student debt, and the likelihood of moving from rural to urban areas.
I don't see why we would assume student loans are the cause.
EDIT: The report on which this article is based presents the correlation, but is explicit about not suggesting causation:
"Importantly, we have not determined whether the relationship between loan balances and borrowers’ migration patterns is causal—for example, if, in order to repay their loans, high-balance borrowers seek higher wages in metropolitan areas.
Instead, we may be observing the effects of factors correlated with loan balances, but not included in the CCP. These may include factors such as family income, degree completion, school selection, or the pursuit of an advanced degree."
Truly rural areas just don't have that many highly qualified positions outside the medical field. But in their regional capitals, definitely not what you would call a town anymore, every position exists that you would also finds in a world class metropolis, just on a much lower payscale. That's where much of the education-caused movement would go in absence of student debt. But when you add debt to the equation, the lure of first tier metropolis money turns from "but on the other hand, cost of living etc" to an offer you cannot reject.
Need to save a large down payment to buy a home => Better to move to the city where I can save more $$ each year
Need to pay down a large student debt => Better to move to the city where I can pay down more $$ of my debt each year
I'm not disagreeing with you: student debts make the hole larger, so strengthen the effect. But the effect is large in any case (due to most of us being born with a 'short position' on housing).
Cost of homes are making ownership unattainable, with the student loans making the lenders refuse to offer a mortgage. My parents era had an extra surplus of homes built and where cost of renting was low with middle class homes needing to be sold. It appears someone had the bright idea to limit construction for the requirements of the next generation and all the previous owners now hold market power or it simply just happened by an over increasing population. Rent has gone up everywhere and it doesn’t matter where you’re located.
The US government created unnecessary debt by the war in Iraq; where public funding changed hands to pay for the war. The banking crisis in 09 was bailed out by the government unnecessarily. The economy crashes as a result of many factors including this.
Universities constantly increasing tuition, the motto college is required becomes a reality and where the entry degrees are now similar to holding a high school diploma. Also why not throw in the debt inducing cost of healthcare if an emergency happens where a service of saving your life can ruin it.
The millennials are resentful of the previous generation throwing their futures away, letting it all happen and knowing social security benefits are drying up as well. The whole thing is a cluster fuck and where some people are okay making a divide by expressing its not necessarily bad. Basically there is a lot of arrogance towards self admiration if you’re doing alright or had parents take the bill. The previous generations didn’t approach their circumstances like that from my understanding. I think my generation is either narcissistic or deluded by excess Facebook, Netflix, who has an android vs an iPhone and other nonsense resulting in loss of the big picture being quality of life. A lot of social conditioning helped the con.
Of course not. Since time began, kids have moving to where higher paying jobs are found.
CBS is too blatant in trying to catapult 'student loan debt' into the headlines.
the only options to get a "good life" are higher education or lucking into a job(i say luck coz the competition is fierce in any developing country) that pays for your immigration
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.