Burrowing Into the Middle As It Hollows Out

In 2001, husband and wife sociologists Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas took up residence in Ellis, Iowa (a fictitious name). With a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, they came to study the struggle of small, rural communities to survive as their most ambitious and best-educated young people left. The result of their research is Hollowing Out the Middle: the Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America (Beacon Press, 2009). 

Carr, now an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers, is a native of Dublin.

Kefalas, an associate professor of sociology at St. Joseph University in Philadelphia, is from Boston, the daughter of a Greek immigrant father and a St. Lucian mother. 

Kefalas and Carr spent parts of the next several years getting to know “Ellis” and its people. They talked to people getting ready to leave, people determined to stay, people in charge of its main institutions. While their research began and ended there, it wasn’t confined to that town, or even to Iowa. 

Their painstaking research was conducted as classic ethnography. They asked questions and listened to the people in a disciplined way but in a relaxed atmosphere – in their own home, in their sources’ homes, or wherever they could capture some time. They conducted most of the interviews themselves, but some of Kefalas’ research assistants at St. Joseph University also conducted and transcribed interviews, administered surveys, and analyzed data. 

They needed to track down and interview Achievers – people who had been encouraged as children and teens to take on the great world beyond Iowa. And they sought out Seekers – those who were not necessarily the best students, but wanted to travel and experience the world. The Achievers might be doctors or lawyers practicing their professions in New York or Washington; the Seekers were particularly likely to join the military as a way out of town, and, like the Achievers, they might be living anywhere. There were also the Returners – the people who had sampled the world outside and decided they preferred Ellis – and the Stayers – those people who never left, and in many cases were told when young that they weren’t good enough for anything but Ellis, Iowa. 

The sociologists found that many of the same social problems afflicting urban areas – high rates of teenage pregnancy, a rise in violence and drug abuse – were present in rural areas. They also concluded that many government policies – local, state and national – contributed to the decades-long brain drain from America’s heartland, that changes in those policies might slow down or reverse the trend, and that such a reversal would be a good thing for the country, as well as for the communities involved. Carr and Kefalas further concluded that educators in such communities often make matters worse by investing an inordinate amount of time and money in preparing academically gifted people to leave, and not enough in making it possible for working people to stay.

Carr and Kefalas conclude that with a plan and a vision that the hollowing out of the nation’s Heartland is not inevitable.