Who's Missing from America's Colleges? Rural High School Graduates
Fascinating that culturally the author couldn&#x27;t bring himself to talk to the kids.  The only kid he talked to was one of the unusual college attendees.  Kind of shocking if you think about it.  He repeated a lot of narrative from numerous professional axe grinders, but nothing can really be learned from that.  It wasn&#x27;t a story about the rural kids who don&#x27;t go to college, it was a story about politicians axe grinding where the claimed subject was never considered; could have been a story &quot;about&quot; Bolivian tin exports or farm subsidies for all the subject mattered to the discussion.<p>An analysis mode the author didn&#x27;t consider is time.  The rate of attendance has increased dramatically over time.  Attendance is a little less than 10% lower for rural kids, and google nearly instantly found a graph of college attendance per year indicating the rate has been increasing at a fairly linear rate of a bit less than five percent per decade, so rural kids are not living in a dystopia as much as they&#x27;re living in roughly the early 00s.  Not a bad time to live, really.  Culturally I&#x27;m sure there are variations in attitude in various areas and having 2005 cultural attitudes in the year 2018 isn&#x27;t really much of an issue especially if your friends family neighbors and employer have attitudes that are significantly pre-2005 anyway.<p>An interesting analysis mode is comparing supply and demand.  According to the linked Washington Post article below, only 27% of college grads in America work in a job closely related to their degree, and &quot;The chances of finding a job related to your degree or major go up a few points if you move to a big city&quot;.  The kids might be intelligent enough to see that taking out a home mortgage sized student loan to get a degree that will not lead to gainful employment is a poor investment.  The article further states only 62 percent of grads had a job that requiring a degree.  You can hand wave a lot, but around 4&#x2F;5 of rural kids are throwing money away if they go to college.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonk&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;only-27-percent-of-college-grads-have-a-job-related-to-their-major" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonk&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;only-...</a><p>The advice on HN usually skews toward advice for SAT score recipients above 1475 points or so... please remember this is a discussion about 100% of American kids not the 1%.  Based on the numbers, college was a waste of money for somewhere between one third and three quarters of attendees, so rural kids not wasting money on a bad investment is not exactly a crisis.