A report released last week shows Koochiching County has experienced a “brain gain” in the last 40 years.
An increase in the number of adults in the county who have earned college degrees was studied by Mississippi State’s Southern Rural Development Center’s associate professor Robert Gallardo. He and Bill Bishop, editor of the news website DailyYonder.com, released the report which was based on Koochiching County census data.
The percentage of adults with college degrees in Koochiching County has increased by 11.4 percent between 1970 and 2010. According to the report, 16.3 percent of adults in the county had a college degree in 2010 and only 4.9 percent in 1970. The report defines “adult” as someone over the age of 25.
“The stats presented in the report clearly point to the value and positive impact that access to higher education provides in rural communities,” said Sue Collins, president of the Northeast Higher Education District, a consortium of five colleges in northeast Minnesota, including Rainy River Community College. “As we know, participation in college is key to community and economic development, as well as personal development.”
The NHED is a part of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system.
Although the numbers are on the rise, the 2010 rates were less than the national average of 27.9 percent and the Minnesota average of 31.4 percent.
The report states, “the loss of young, well-educated residents has posed a long-standing difficulty for rural communities.”
It adds that the percentage of adults with degrees in rural counties, including Koochiching, while increasing, has “generally fallen behind the proportion of college-educated residents in urban communities.”
Referring to statistics on people with other high education but not necessarily a college degree, the report states, “The good news for rural America is that it has caught up in every other measure of education.”
The largest gain in Koochiching County was the percentage of adults in the county who had some post-high school education, but less than a college degree. That number was higher than average compared to other rural counties in the nation.
In 1970, 6.9 percent of adults in Koochiching County had “some college.” According to the most recent census data, that number jumped to 33.2 percent in 2010.
Overall, the nationwide rural county average of adults who had gained some post-high school education was 27.4 in 2010.
The report states that “the trends show that rural people have responded to the demand for increased job skills by increasing their post-secondary education” and that “there are perhaps more jobs in rural areas that require post-secondary education but not college.”
In addition, the report points out that the reason rural communities have fallen behind the national average of residents with a college degree is the “self-reinforcing cycle” in rural communities — when young people leave to gain higher education and don’t come back because there aren’t many jobs there that demand such an education.
As RRCC is the only college in Koochiching County, Collins said the college “has played a significant role” in producing the increased education statistics.
“And while we are pleased with the improvement depicted in the study, our goal at RRCC and within the Northeast Higher Education District is to continue to grow the number of community residents with college credentials,” Collins said.
Collins attributes the ability of RRCC to provide higher education to the community to the “unwavering support of this community and businesses and industries within the community.”
The report says its findings suggest that businesses and rural communities may need to evaluate the “types of jobs” being created. It also stated some communities are doing things like getting local businesses to put an emphasis on hiring local people with a college education.
The lower education statistics in rural counties, “really suggests that rural communities that aren’t thinking about making themselves attractive to educated people are really going to suffer,” Judith Stallmann, an economist at the University of Missouri told DailyYonder.com.
Collins said that she hopes RRCC will “continue to have positive impact on the county’s degree attainment statistics.”
The report also shows that Koochiching County maintains higher-than-average high school graduation rates. Nationally, 15 percent of adults had not completed high school. In Koochiching County, 11 percent of the adult population had failed to graduate from high school in 2010.
