North Carolina’s rural areas need investments that will draw young people

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently hosted a panel of scholars and pundits to figure out what’s wrong with the way college students are selected and what they choose to do with their lives.

The concern is that our young people go off to four years of fancy schooling and emerge with no sense of obligation to their home communities. They collect a diploma and move to the big city.

“The current way of running college admissions concentrates talent, ambition, and competence in very few areas,” said Anastasia Berg, a philosopher at Oxford. “It drains potential leaders in local communities.”

Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist, said the clustering of college grads in like-minded communities is widening our economic and cultural divides. “There is a meritocratic mystique,” he said. “All your friends are going to go to Brooklyn, or at least the North Carolina equivalent of Brooklyn.”

A student stood up toward the end and asked the best question of the night. “I’m from a small town,” he said. “Why should I move back?”

Making a compelling case to that student is one of the most important things North Carolina’s leaders can do for our state. Not because college graduates are the end-all, be-all of local development, but because the kind of things that draw graduates back home are the kind of things that benefit everyone: a strong sense of local identity, an openness to new ideas (and new people), infrastructure that encourages connection rather than isolation.

At an NC State forum last month, Zach Barricklow of Wilkes Community College spoke about the growing population of teleworkers clustered around Sparta in Alleghany County. Rural northwestern North Carolina might seem an unlikely landing spot for transplants from New York and Atlanta, but Barricklow said the community is making an explicit pitch about quality of life. “There’s this growing population of people who have decided to opt out of the suburban slog,” he said, pointing out that Sparta’s two-stoplight Main Street holds a lot of appeal for people fed up with long commutes.

“They’re working for companies in Raleigh, they’re working for companies in Charlotte. But they’re also working for companies in Chicago.” And they can go mountain biking on their lunch breaks.

At the same event, Zach Mannheimer of Alchemy Community Transformations gave a fascinating talk about rethinking economic incentives. He said North Carolina should stop trying to recruit companies and industries and instead focus on investments that recruit people. “What’s unique about your community?” he asked. “What can your community do to incentivize more people to come here?”

That usually means public spaces downtown, art and cultural projects that put a singular stamp on the community, and the patience to nurture small businesses instead of pining for a big corporate savior.

We’ve gotten used to a sense of deep pessimism about rural America, just as we once took for granted that big cities were mired in unlivable decline. Trends always continue right up until the moment they don’t, and what seemed impossible suddenly becomes obvious.

Not everyone in North Carolina is going to live in Raleigh or Charlotte, no matter how hard we try to cram them all in. If the state is going to keep growing like ragweed, we need vibrant small towns and welcoming rural places.

As for what our colleges can do, they can start by pushing students toward a conception of life that’s bigger than career ambition. Those Carolina panelists were right about the stifling effect of having so many of our best and brightest working on personal finance apps or social media marketing.

“Narrow definitions of success can be corrupting and debilitating,” Berg said during the UNC discussion. There are higher callings, in places big and small. We should make it our mission to help students find them.

Community columnist Eric Johnson works for the College Board and UNC’s College of Arts & Sciences.

This story was originally published March 3, 2020 at 12:40 PM.