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Title: Questioning the Historical Rural Education Advantage: Evidence from U.S. Complete Count Censuses, 1870 to 1940

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2023

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Abstract: A remarkable and repeatedly replicated rural school attendance and enrollment advantage in the pre-Great Depression period confounds both critical historians and functionalist social scientists, who argue that the processes of urbanization and industrialization was central to the U.S.’s rapid postbellum school system expansion. This expansion, and the rural attendance advantage has typically been attributed to the rise of the high school movement, a decentralized campaign to expand secondary school education that started in New England and rapidly spread to the Midwest. How robust was the rural school participation advantage? Did this advantage translate to into an advantage in conventionally measured educational attainment? I investigate these questions using the 1870 – 1930 full count Census records of children aged 5 to 19, which I link to the full count 1940 Decennial Census, the first to record educational attainment. I document the following four facts. First, at the individual, county-, and state-levels, urbanization and the fraction of the population engaged in manufacturing were associated with higher levels of school attendance at younger ages; the reverse was true at high school ages both before and after 1900. Second, urbanization and industrialization were associated with reduced school attendance among all students aged 5 to 19. Third, I replicate earlier findings that school attendance propensity was decreasing in local population size all else equal for older youth, but, again, the reverse was true at younger ages. Fourth, I compare the reported 1940 educational attainment of rural youth aged 5 to 19 appearing in the 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1920 with urban youth appearing in the same cross-section. Relative to large cities, the age-specific rural attendance advantages I document did not usually translate into elevated educational attainment in the Census cross- sections analyzed. The rapid spread of the high school movement in rural areas and elevated age- specific attendance rates that ensued did not overcome the structural disadvantages associated with growing up in a rural area. In the pre-Great Depression U.S., elevated measures on the age- specific attendance and enrollment statistics used in prior studies of school system expansion may not always have signaled increased educational opportunity.

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Authors: Lachanski, Michael

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data

Topics: Education, Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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