Patrick Carr
There’s a song
that was written at the turn of the 20th century, as legions of young workers from the countryside sought their luck and
fortune building America’s great cities. It begins:
How ya gonna keep ’em, down on the farm,
After
they’ve seen Pa-ree?
That’s much the same question
Patrick Carr, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers, and his wife, Maria Kefalas, an associate professor of sociology
at St. Joseph University, ask in their new book, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain
Drain and What It Means for America (Beacon Press, 2009).
Read more here in a Research Highlights page about their research.
The migration of young people from America’s small
towns and cities has continued almost
unabated for the last century. Carr and Kefalas sought to understand the reasons behind
this almost preordained exodus of talent and ideas that has signaled the demise
of so many small communities.
For six months,
the couple and their daughter lived in Ellis, a town of 2,000 in
rural northeastern Iowa. They had been brought there as part of a larger MacArthur Foundation study that sought to understand coming of age in
America. After sending questionnaires to recent graduates of Ellis’s high
school, the couple began to see a pattern of high achievers who left the town for greener pastures. They saw firsthand the
effects of the community’s brain drain
and they realized fairly quickly, as Carr notes, “that coming of age in a small town means asking
yourself two questions: Do you stay or do you go? And if you go, do you ever come back?”
The turning point in
their work came with an invitation from members of the local Rotary Club. As Carr
recalls, “They really wanted to know how to get professionals to move back to town. ‘How do we get doctors and
lawyers and those kinds of folks to move back?’ And we said, ‘The
problem is, you’re doing such a good job of driving
them away.’
America's rural, farming communities are losing talented young people.
A new book by a Rutgers sociologist and his wife examines the problem and possible solutions.
Time and again,
Carr and Kerfalas had witnessed the lavishing of attention on high achievers –
those most likely to leave town for college and never come back – to the detriment of average students, the type most
likely to stay in town. Carr is quick to say that he doesn’t believe resources
shouldn’t be spent on high-achieving students just that it would serve these
small towns and cities well to mentor
and cultivate those students who are likely to stay in town or to return after
college.
What surprised the researchers was the extent to which the social mechanism of
a small town is so efficient at driving
these kids away. School officials are aware of it but can’t see themselves doing
it any differently. “There is a slow seeping away of talent and underinvestment in students. I don’t think that people are unwilling to embrace other
ideas; they just don’t know how else to do things,” Carr says.
Carr and his wife hope that administrators and
residents of small towns like Ellis
will see their book as a starting point
for discussion. “We didn’t discover this and we don’t have all the solutions, but we imagined
this book as a tool for starting that conversation,” he says.
It’s a conversation in which towns
throughout the United States are engaged. Although the Midwest has its fair share of dying
towns, similar scenes of “hollowing
out” are playing out in former
mining and manufacturing
towns from upstate New York to the Deep South. Carr has received calls from across
the country in response to his book and he wants to let people know that there
are solutions.
“There are things that
we can do to make these places more vibrant, more viable. We need changes at the local and national level. At the local
level, we need to re-imagine education and make better linkages
between schools and colleges,” Carr argues. “We need to train and expose
kids to jobs in health, nursing, biotech,
and alternative energy. At the national level, we need to agitate for funds for sustainable
energy and rethink how we produce food. We could provide more support for community-supported
agriculture and local farming, and we need immigration and labor policies done
right.”
At a time when the national recession has signaled the death knell of towns throughout the country, Carr’s book provides hope of resuscitation.
