Sounds like your neighbors are close. Try seeing how waiting for your neighbors to show up works when your house is off a logging road and a tree falls across it taking out your power and phone lines, which only go to your house. Nobody is coming. You gotta cut your way out and drive into town to call the power company.

That’s what I mean by rural. It’s a fine way to live. But not for everybody. I prefer just to visit, and usually not in the winter months because I don’t have the right truck.

I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about or what your point is.

Rural people are poorly educated relative to suburban or urban peers. They’re also economically worse off. They also come from places that are culturally more hostile to education. They also live in places with fewer jobs that require skills learned in college.

These are all “walls” leading to lower rates of college attendance for rural kids.

Also worth noting that the vast majority of college students leave their communities to go to college. That is not at all unique to rural communities. In fact, colleges end up being the good employer in many rural communities and act as economic drivers.

The problems is often these schools are too good for the locals, or too expensive, so they don’t attend at high rates at all.

College degrees and attendance is significantly lower for rural communities than ur burbs now and suburban ones, and those who do go tend to not come back.

This dynamic is getting more extreme in America because Republicans are getting more and more anti-college (too woke) and rural places tend to be very conservative.

So your grades muggy allow you to go to Ohio State, but your parents might not let you for fear they’ll teach you critical race theory and make you trans.

It’s also of course more expensive than it used to be and these places are much less affluent. That probably also matters to who attends college these days.

“Wait, nobody comes to get the trees off the .75 mile driveway when they fall and take out the power and phone in the winter? What the hell!”

Good luck figuring out a chainsaw in the snow, mr soft hands!

Interesting stuff. We moved from a city to a fancy burb. It feels rural with all the animals, huge lies, and driving. So much driving.

Half our neighbors are from other places. Half of them are from here and never left.

The houses are absurdly cheap to us, but are the high end of the market for the region.

But we are not private school people so I didn’t look into how that sound with in a rural place. Nature is great, but if you’re wasting your life on the bus and not even participating in your community, why bother living there when you’re still working all the time?

This is definitely happening but the natural limiter will be schools. Rural schools suck, so if you are a highly-educated worker with kids, you’re fairly limited in where you can move. What you are seeing more of as far as I can tell is people moving out into the suburbs for more space & that’s pushing people who could’ve afforded that further out.

The “let’s move to a farm” thing seems to be the kid-less people. I know a few of those who are in Montana somewhere, but only a few.

It turns out the internet is slow and there’s no Asian food out there, so it’s more fun to visit.

It’s as though people in cities get better educations and thus have the skills unavailable to rural communities with poor access to education due to their lack of density.

This is why it’s a fool’s errand to think things like “rural broadband” magically improve rural economies. At best they let the urban middle class move to these places, work remote, and put their high-skill money into these economies.

This is a knowledge economy and we need to stop being shocked that geographies that aren’t designed to participate in it don’t benefit from it.