Review Redux: Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America

I originally reviewed this book on Goodreads in 2014 and have edited it somewhat to respond to some of the comments made there. And repost the edited review here.

This is a prime example of why sociology is not science. No testable hypothesis, or repeatable data, just a mélange of anecdotes from which sweeping generalizations are drawn. I do not mean to demean Sociology or any other discipline. Heavens, I taught a Sociology course and another in Political Science, but neither field is a science in the sense that they truly apply the scientific method, i.e, develop a testable, predictive, theory from a hypothesis developed from data. The problem I had here was that the data set (if one could call it that) was tiny and very limited and certainly not enough to draw meaningful conclusions. I love Sociology, Anthropology, etc, but I've been around long enough (too long?) not to be skeptical.

I live in a rural area (the closest town to me has a population of 2,500) and as a community college dean (population of the town 27,000 but a district covering hundreds of square miles that borders on NE Iowa) got to observe many rural high schools over thirty years. These two researchers, husband and wife, have the temerity to move to a small town in Iowa for 18 months, interview some local students, and from those observations, draw all sorts of conclusions. (After some poking around, it would appear that the community described in the book is Sumner, Iowa. Funny thing. My father and mother grew up in Fayette, Iowa, not fifteen miles east of Sumner. I suppose my parents are both examples of the brain drain. My father left to study at Yale and become a university president on the west coast. My mother hated the farm near Randalia – now a ghost town -- and talked disparagingly of Iowa the rest of her life. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Education and lived on the east coast. So should the high school in Fayette have tried to move them into the vo-tech track to keep them in Fayette? And this was 80 years ago.)

To draw those conclusions, it's obvious the authors have bought into the national mythology of the small town that probably never existed except in people's minds. Are rural areas in trouble economically? Yes. Are we losing population and youth? Yes. Has it always been so? Pretty much. Can it be fixed by adjusting the values of the local high schools? Hardly.

It's become fashionable to blame the problems of rural areas on agribusiness. The size of farms has increased, but ALL of the farms in this area are owned by family corporations. It takes brains to run anything but a hobby farm, those quaint little small acreages that profess to be sustainable by selling "organic" vegetables at the local outdoor market. No way are they sustainable economically and ALL rely on a second income in the family to pay the bills. The problems outlined by the authors are not unique to rural America. They are descriptive of an ever increasing under-class that exists both in rural and urban areas, one that reveals disdain for unions, a desire for the cheapest goods which necessarily fuels jobs abroad and the need for undocumented workers.

Their solution? Make the high school a "town-saver" by not pushing highly motivated students into four-year colleges and emphasize associate degree and vocational education. Just where have they been in the past forty years? Vocational adjuncts to community colleges were all the rage 30 years ago and have all withered on the vine for lack of students. "Gone are the days of plentiful, well-paying blue-collar factory jobs..." they report. Well, duh. That's why the vo-tech schools closed. Students don’t see a future in blue-collar work so they are flocking to four-year schools and community colleges to get into high tech and service industry jobs. My community college has a going program in training wind-turbine technicians, something they recommend starting. All they had to do was look forty miles across the Mississippi to see what they recommend already in effect. [Note that this program was discontinued 10 years later for lack of students.]

Their recommendation for small towns to embrace immigration, while laudable, would simply distort the labor market even further, driving down wages already too low. They suggest incentive programs to get professionals back to rural areas, especially in health care. The University of Illinois started just such a program forty years ago, building three regional medical schools precisely for the purpose of training rural family practitioners. Health care is thriving in my community but only because of gerontology and the movement of those who left. My college town of 27,000 has TWO dialysis centers. That tells you a lot.

In the thirty years or so I was at the college, I participated in innumerable focus and planning sessions designed to bring industry etc. to the community and revitalize the economy.Several opportunities arose: a prison the state wanted to build, a large pork processing plant, a mega-dairy in the western part of the district, and plastics plant. The town is close to a four-lane highway connecting to I-90. Each one of these initiatives was shot down. The community didn't want the traffic of visitors from Chicago coming to the prison; they didn't want "illegal" aliens to move to the area to work in the pork processing plant or mega-dairy, and they didn't want the pollution from a new industry. (And we won’t even talk about the ICE raids on Postville, Iowa that virtually closed the town after building a thriving Kosher meat plant.) What HAS thrived in the area is nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, and gerontological health care. Young people are moving out but returning here to die. Now how the educational community can solve that by focusing on vo-tech is beyond me. In the meantime, the company that thrived here and supported the economy has moved most of its operations to Mexico.

Many people resent sociologists like these two and I suspect their data suffers from the "Margret Mead" syndrome if not the "observer effect." We followed events in Postville, Iowa (could it be the same town pseudonymously named Ellis by the authors?) and read Stephen Bloom's "Postville: A Clash of Culture in Heartland America." I visited Postville and talked with a friend who was the chief deputy sheriff for a large county in which a corner of Postville resides. His take on Bloom? BS. Bloom only talked to a few people and many of his conclusions were just wrong. I have a feeling that Carr and Kefalas made similar mistakes and that they went to "Ellis" with a preconceived idea and found anecdotes to support it.

There’s also an element of holier-than-thou that really frosts me. They move to a small town, spent a short amount of time there, and then purport to tell the residents everything they are doing wrong. I’m a liberal (albeit with libertarian tendencies) but this kind of paternalism I find repugnant.

Note that Carr was born and raised in Ireland and Kefalas studied at Wellesley and the University of Chicago and they now live outside of Philadelphia, no doubt on the Mainline (full disclosure: I grew up on the Mainline.)

A very weak book with few new ideas.

Edit 2/19/19