Rural Americans Aren't Going To College. Should They?
A lifetime ago, when I still lived in Iowa and had a front-row seat to the Democratic presidential primary, I attended one of Steve Bullock’s events. You’ve probably never heard of Bullock — he was a two-term governor of Montana and a late addition to the 2020 campaign. Like many in that crowded field, Bullock was probably campaigning more for VP than for President, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to see him in action.
Afterward, I told him where I was from and how I’d watched my little town slip over the years. Downturns in timber and mining hit the public schools hard. I saw the difference in my younger siblings. I didn’t have any answers, but I wondered what he might do about it.
The only answer Steve Bullock could offer was, “We’re bringing broadband to Troy.”
Bullock was born in Missoula and raised in Helena. He’d also been Governor of the state for eight years, so he should have known better. The only thing broadband would do is make it possible for a California professional to work remotely from their new Montana home. Probably half the locals couldn’t afford it, and the cost would outweigh the benefits for local businesses. But by the time I met him, you might say that Bullock had been shaped more by his education at Claremont McKenna and Columbia, and his years as a big-time lawyer in Washington, D.C., than by his Montana raising.
I was thinking about Bullock’s story during my recent vacation home, because it illustrates so well how many different Montanas there are. And how many different Americas we are all living in.
Bullock is only nine years older than me, and many of my classmates followed paths similar to his from small public schools to elite universities. In nearly every case, those investments paid off. But during my visit home this year, I began to wonder if Bullock’s story might now only be possible — and advisable — for students with a significant amount of privilege. Is a college degree still the best bet for a kid like me?1
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One of my cousins married a young man from Alaska. Her husband helps run the family fishing business and works as a construction contractor. They also own some rentals to house tourists in their fishing village. It is perhaps impolite to speculate about their earnings, but they now own multiple homes — one in Alaska, one in Montana — and spend a month or two during the winter living on a sailboat in Florida.
By most external measures, theirs is an upper middle class life. But one factor distinguishes them from their suburban counterparts: my cousin and her husband are debt free.
This is an America you don’t read much about, where economic mobility is not only possible, but perhaps greater without a college degree. There are some sacrifices required, such as living in an unfinished home until they can save enough to pay for more materials. But there is also enormous freedom. There aren’t any appearances to keep up, no certain kind of car to drive. There’s more than enough, and if the kids want more, they know they’ll need to earn it.
That kind of life lands differently for girls. Every time I’m tempted to wax rhapsodic about Montana, I’m reminded of Tara Westover’s story. She told Dave Davies in a Fresh Air interview,
[I]n my mind growing up, there wasn't ever any question of what my future would look like. I would get married when I was 17 or 18. And I would be given some corner of the farm and my husband would put a house on it and we would have kids. And possibly, I would become a midwife like my mother.
So I don’t mean to suggest that provincial life is paradise. College was exactly what Westover needed, and she was fortunate that powerful people helped make it affordable for her. Without those opportunities, no one would have heard her story.
There was a time when I argued, like Westover, that education offers liberation from provincialism. That seemed true for me as a bookish teenager. But even that assumption might have been incorrect. I was bookish, in part, because my family didn’t own a television and rarely went to the movies. But I also inherited those traits from my mother, who discovered Chaim Potok and C.S. Lewis (my early influences) through a close friend. At the time, neither my mother nor her friend were college graduates.
I often told my first-year students that the difference between educating yourself independently and studying at college is that you’re surrounding yourself with like-minded people in a college community. Just as I run a faster 5K on race day than training solo, so everyone is buoyed by a cohort striving toward a similar goal.
Sometimes you also need others to rattle your cage and help you see yourself differently. John Gorka’s “Ignorance and Privilege” captures the real rationale for going to college: “If the wind is at your back and you never turn around / You may never know the wind is there / You may never hear the sound.” That’s part of what studying literature did for me.
But it’s possible to cultivate empathy and self-criticism without a college degree, and the Gorka illustration only holds if higher education is affordable. Given that students increasingly seek out affinity groups in college and that broad surveys have been replaced by topical or boutique offerings, one might say that universities now reinforce, rather than transform, many students. Is it really worth the equivalent of a home mortgage in debt to graduate college as a more intense version of who you were at the start?2
Which brings me back to Steve Bullock.
Bullock’s parents were both power brokers in some of the largest school systems in the state, but I imagine that he entered the freshman class at Claremont McKenna a little out of his league, ravenous to catch up to his classmates with more money and prep school advantages.3 According to a 2019 essay, Bullock paid his way through Claremont McKenna by working odd jobs. But Columbia Law School meant another step up in competition and $100,000 in debt. Those degrees worked the way they were supposed to, translating to lucrative employment that earned infinitely more than the loans he incurred.
But in the years between graduating high school in 1984 and campaigning for president in 2019, Bullock lost touch with how things work for today’s rural youth. Maybe he never knew. Why else would he think that broadband Internet would move the needle an inch in Troy, Montana?
The primary challenge for the first-generation student is embracing the modern world. The degree doesn’t necessarily open doors if you don’t know how (or reject the premise of how) to leverage it. If you grew up in a family like mine, your grandfather might have paid his union dues and picketed occasionally for better pay, as my Grandpa Herman did. He worked as hard as anyone else, but he never would have called himself a company man.
The last time I saw my grandfather, he didn’t know who I was, but he gave me a firm handshake and looked me in the eye. That’s how deeply that ethic took root. By contrast, my academic training often felt like a series of secret handshakes. I studied the pages of PMLA, the top journal in my field, with a mixture of confusion (when I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was being said) and disgust (when I got the gist). As the Grievance Studies hoax revealed, the proper response to some peer-reviewed articles is: “The Emperor has no clothes.”
But despite the common view of industry as more practical than academe, business is an equally obscure discourse community. There is now a booming market for post-academic job coaches who can guide you through the harder-than-it-should-be process of translating your faculty skills into business terms. I’m friends with many of these coaches. They have results to prove that their methods work. But they often miss the deeper stumbling block for so many of us with rural roots, namely, that the whole thing feels like sleight of hand.
It’s very hard to lean into personal branding, selling your skills, and translating one job into different terms when you’ve been raised to shoot straight and promise no more than you can give.
To wit, I routinely see an advertisement on LinkedIn telling me to stop calling myself a freelance writer. Because that’s like labeling myself a cashier, when I could be a concierge. It’s a shorter version of this longer video by Nicholas Cole, co-founder of Premium Ghostwriting Academy.
Like many other content creators, Cole is trying to sell you on his courses and other services, and so you have to take what he says with a grain of manure. But there is a ring of truth to the premise that your college degree isn’t the real education. It’s not where you went to school or the kind of grades you got that matters so much as whether you’re successfully selling people on your worth. That perception creates your reality. So after paying thousands for an undergraduate or graduate degree, you can pay Cole hundreds more to figure out how to leverage your credential properly.
Even if there is a method to it, that game feels an awful lot like the arbitrary sorting that happens in high school cliques. The firm handshake doesn’t help there, either; it’s who you know, the secret language you speak, whether others in the cool club are going to let you in. To a country kid who never felt cool to begin with and who knew that grinding away at coolness was a fool’s errand, that’s the steepest mindset curve to overcome. Because the new language you have to learn? It feels an awful lot like an arbitrary barrier that was designed to screen you out.
Who would want to join such a club that would have you for a member?
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I thought about these things while sitting on another cousin’s front porch in Montana. He is a former Marine (I’ve mentioned him a time or two) who logged and roughnecked for a time before learning the real way to get ahead. After passing some certification tests, he is now a sought-after inspector on construction sites and oil pipelines across the West. And his front porch isn’t really a porch. It is the entrance to his shop, which has a half-acre concrete footprint. You could easily fit thirty school buses inside.
My cousin works hard and has earned everything he has. Yet I can’t say that I sacrificed less as an academic, given that graduate school and faculty work meant leaving Montana permanently. The price for his supervisory role is travel. We sometimes speak for an hour or more while he’s sitting in his truck at the job site, bored stiff. I only wish I could have done the same during all the hours I logged in committees and the many Deaths by Powerpoint. For six months every year, my cousin travels; for the other six he gardens, keeps building his shop, and picks my brain for hot sauce recipes. He has a good life.
My cousin is also as generous as anyone in my family. He loaned a club-cab pickup to me for the duration of my visit (which saved me a costly rental) and forced me to take some Alaskan shrimp and smoked trout with me when I left. I’m still not sure what I’ve ever offered in return.
I can’t say that a college degree would have helped him much.
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I did a lot of fun things with my kids in Montana this year, but the one they were most excited about only ranked third in their list of favorites. You will not be shocked to hear that this inspired a metaphor.
Silverwood is the largest theme park in the Pacific Northwest, located just outside Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho. It only offered rides when I was young, but now it has two huge campuses featuring roller coasters on one side and a sprawling water park on the other. It’s an expensive day, but it’s where the cool cats go. My kids were pumped to visit because I’d shared the website ahead of time. My eldest even came with a handwritten list of the rides she wanted to do.
The heat index topped 100 that day. The lines for rides were short, and I followed my daughter through her list, watching her shriek on a spinny, tilty thing that would have made me sick. We got happily soaked on a rafting ride and dried off on a medium coaster called the Corkscrew, which turned us both into bobbleheads.
The sun was relentless by early afternoon, and the water park offered little relief. My son ran laps on the kiddie slides, making buddies left and right. But the adult rides had long lines, twenty minutes or more. While I waited with my daughter for Eagle Hunt, a tube run, we shifted from foot to foot on the scorching concrete, eyeing the line stretching down five flights of stairs and wrapping fifty yards up the sidewalk to where we stood.
As we stood there, I thought about how well the moment captured working life for many Americans. You pay your dues, make it to the foot of the stairs, and hope you can climb all the way to the top. Most of it isn’t fun, but by the time you begin to question the premise, you’ve already sunk so much time that you might as well stick it out. Yet the longer you wait, the more you wonder why the stiff back and sunburn are worth a 15-second splash to the bottom.
You look around, thinking maybe it’s time to bail, but no one else is. I’m as tough as that guy, you think. I’m no flake. Besides, you paid the entry fee. This is part of what you’re supposed to get in return.
You can hear the shrieks up above, but you can’t see the end of the slide. You want to call out to someone, “Is it worth it? Would you do it again?” But they’re just gone. And they don’t come back.
I kept telling my daughter that we’d just hang tough, and she agreed for a spell. But when we had nearly reached the foot of the stairs it had been half an hour, and she worried she wouldn’t have enough time to do the other slides. Most of her afternoon would be spent in that stupid line.
“Do you want to try something else?” I asked. We squinted up again at those five flights of stairs. Then we left that silent and miserable crowd behind.
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When I asked my kids later what their favorite activities were, they said they’d come back to Silverwood. But there were two things that blew the park out of the water.
The first was an animal shelter where my uncle volunteers. The shelter presently houses more than 20 kittens, which climbed all over my kids for an hour they didn’t want to end. The look on my daughter’s face says it all. The cost? Not a dime.
The second was a roller rink which has changed not a bit since I bruised my knees there as a child. It cost $7 per person and $5 for the training guides. We skated in the dark to neon lights and a disco ball, did chariot races, and competed to see who could clear the lowest limbo bar. There was zero hype, nothing really but a square room and the challenge of mastery, which sustained my children through two sweaty hours.
I thought of Cather’s paraphrase of the great Dumas. The only thing needed to make a drama, he claimed, is one passion and four walls.
You can learn that in college. But while I filmed two young women competing at the limbo, I thought of all the other forms that freedom, happiness, and growth might take.
Colleges spend millions (billions?) of dollars trying to recruit rural kids. The prevailing assumption (as in this report) is that college is in their best interest. Increasingly, I’m not so sure.
What is even more painful is when college is transformative personally, but not professionally. Two of my former students, each from the college town where I worked and each among the finest writers I ever mentored, never left. One young man took a job managing a local hotel, and the other worked the cash register at a gas station. Maybe they could have dreamed bigger, tried harder, but I wonder if college made them happier in the end?
Like me, Bullock couldn’t afford a campus visit, so he showed up as a freshman sight unseen.
I was a poor reservation Indian kid who started college intending to become pediatrician and then found my way to poetry and fiction. At no point whatsoever did I think of myself as a political activist. Over six years of college, I read hundreds of books of fiction and poetry. That's why I was in college. To read my way through as much of the world as I could and to have professors point me toward the most valuable books. It was all about the books.
Joshua, what a beautiful piece this is, and I love that video at the end. My father would have agreed with you - in his case, he grew up with a single mother among the urban poor in Denver (although my grandmother was escaping from the farm of her immigrant Norwegian family in South Dakota). My dad got through Denver University on a full scholarship and managed to get a pol-sci Ph.D. with grants and a stint in the military. He was meant to be an academic, and his education meant everything to him, but it’s also true that he always felt like an outsider among the Ivy elite.
He drilled into me the problem of college debt, saying he’d get me through my BA if I could cover some of the costs with a scholarship (I did, although I don’t think that’s possible now), but for grad school, I was on my own. A few years later, I managed that by getting my employer to cover my tuition at a state university while I was working.
I say all this to highlight the motivation required if you don’t come from a privileged background. Probably my father’s most consequential achievement as an academic was to found and grow an “accelerated” degree program for adult students at his California state university. He loved those students, as do I the adult students I teach.
I agree that not everyone needs a college degree to thrive and make their way financially. There are many ways to educate yourself. But the one thing college courses will give you is a framework for how to learn, especially when it comes to putting in the effort to become a deep reader and writer. The growth I’ve seen in students when they’re ready to put in the time - and have affordable options - makes me think my father’s legacy lives on.