The stereotype of rural Americans “left behind” by the economy doesn’t hold water, according to a report released Thursday by Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce. The report’s analysis of data from the U.S. Census shows that rural men are just as likely as their urban counterparts to have jobs with middle-class wages, and that rural workers with a high-school diploma or less are more likely to have such jobs than their urban counterparts.
The counterintuitive rural-employment outlook could help explain flagging enrollments at many colleges in rural areas in recent years and may contribute to the public narrative that college isn’t worth the expense and trouble. But the report’s authors see an opportunity for colleges alongside the challenge.
Out of about 119 million workers ages 25 to 64 nationwide, 15 million of them live in rural areas. According to the center’s analysis, about half of those rural workers have “good jobs” that pay middle-class wages, which the center defines as $43,000 per year plus benefits for a worker 25-44 years old and $55,000 for those ages 45-64. Rural men do especially well in the labor market; 61 percent of those who are employed have good jobs, the same as their urban peers, while only 46 percent of women do, compared to 38 percent of their urban peers. (The gender disparity derives from several factors, including more women working part-time and historically earning less compared to men.)
Lacking a college degree is not as much of an impediment to a good job in rural areas as it is in urban areas, the report’s authors found. Only one in four workers in rural America holds a bachelor’s degree, but they hold 36 percent of the good jobs, and workers with a high-school diploma or less were more likely to hold a good job in rural America than their urban counterparts. Rural workers with a high-school education have a 40-percent likelihood of having a good job, compared to a 36-percent likelihood for urban peers.
The state of the rural-employment landscape has probably contributed to falling enrollments at many colleges in rural areas, says Martin Van Der Werf, director of editorial and education policy for the center and a co-author of the report. (Van Der Werf is a former Chronicle editor.) Community colleges enrolled 4.6 million students last fall, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, up from 4.4 million the previous year and the first time it’s risen since the pre-pandemic fall of 2019, when the institutions enrolled 5.2 million students. Rural populations have been aging and declining, “so there actually has been a greater percentage of people who are out of the labor force,” Van Der Werf says. Combined with a strong economy, that has meant a robust rural job market, he adds, and when there are a lot of jobs, “the incentive to go to college is certainly less.”
The relative advantages of the rural economy were not evenly distributed. In addition to men holding more good jobs than women, white workers held more good jobs than Latino/a and Black workers. While white workers in rural areas had a 53-percent likelihood of earning middle-class wages nationwide, Latino/a workers in rural areas had only a 37-percent likelihood and Black workers had only a 34-percent likelihood. There were geographical variations, too. Rural workers had a 56-percent likelihood of having a good job in the Northeast and Midwest, according to the analysis, compared to a 48-percent likelihood in the West and South, even though the largest concentration of rural good jobs — 39 percent — is located in the South. (The Midwest has 36 percent.)
The unequal distribution of middle-class work arises, in part, from other inequities, says Mary Alice McCarthy, the founder and senior director of the Center on Education and Labor at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit policy group. One reason there are more jobs for workers without college degrees in the Northeast and Midwest, she says, is “because this is an area in which there were a lot of organizations representing working-class interests, there were higher rates of unionization. In the South, in the Southeast, specifically, and then also in the Southwest, we’re seeing the legacy of the complete absence of worker power, worker voice.”
These good jobs can help workers support their families right out of high school, but many of them come with limited futures — they involve manual labor that can take a toll on the body and are often dependent on economic whims. The report comes with extensive recommendations for colleges to improve outcomes for rural Americans, including more and better counseling, allowing more community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees, and improved work-force training.
The labor force itself isn’t getting bigger, Van Der Werf notes, but employers are crying out about skills shortages. The rural job market may be unexpectedly competing with colleges, but it also offers them an opportunity.
