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Should we banish “brain drain” from our vocabulary
January 8th, 2010 by Mike Knutson
In his report “Rural Migration: The Brain Gain of Newcomers,” Ben Winchester tells us that many parts of rural Minnesota are experiencing a brain gain with new residents age 30-45 moving in. This is a very important occurrence because rural areas tend to lose younger individuals as they go off to college.
For those who haven’t read the report, I want to share a few insights Ben sent me via e-mail.
First, Ben’s research leads him to believe the trend he discovered in Minnesota is widespread across the Rural Midwest, including South Dakota. While I trust Ben’s academic prowess, I’d still like to see some research to support it. After all, my South Dakota heritage tells me that all the good stuff happens to Minnesota and not South Dakota.
Second, he highlights a point made explicit in his report: Over half of the residents moving to rural communities come with college degrees. This trend has helped raise the educational attainment level of rural communities. In other words, the communities are getting smarter, not dumber, which leads to his last point.
Finally, using the word “brain drain” to describe the rural population movement creates problems for us as we try to move rural communities forward. As Ben writes, “the use of negative language to describe the dynamics of our small towns (brain drain, outmigration) makes it difficult to foresee a way forward for our rural people.”
This last point is one that I’ve long agreed with. From my economic development specialist’s perspective, using “brain drain” creates a marketing challenge. Why would we expect outsiders to look positively at our communities when we imply that the smart people are all moving away?
But I’ve continued to use the phrase anyway for a couple reasons. First, even though it’s negative, the phrase helps focus our attention on the issue of young people moving out of our communities. And second, I’m not aware of a term to replace it with.
Ben and I hope to get together sometime in the near future to discuss this and other issues. I’m open to the possibility of banishing the word from my vocabulary. But before I do, want to throw the topic out to our readers here at ReImagine Rural.
Should we banish the phrase “brain drain” from our language? And if so, how can we continue to focus attention on the need to create change in our rural communities so that they become more attractive places for young people? What do you think?
Photo Credit: spierzchala - Flickr
Tags: brain drain, brain gain, Minnesota, people attraction strategy, population movement
Posted in Community Development, Economic Development, Rural | Comments (
15 )
January 8th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Brain drain seems to imply that the town is left with the dumb folk who will never be the clever white collar professionals city folk are. I think that devalues what makes small towns most attractive.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Amitai Etzioni’s article in New Republic, Get Rich Now.
He(?) predicts that the consequence of this recession may be that we can no longer base “the good life” on consumer success, but rather on our communitarian and transcendental achievements. By which he means participation in family, community, and arts.
Oh, sure, we always have given lip service to the importance of family and community, arts. But our actions say nicer houses, cars, and electronics are what we’re giving our lives for.
I’m hoping Etzioni is correct. As a software professional, I can’t come up with a career path for myself that is lucrative, growing, challenging, and meaningful anymore. I can expect one mind-numbing job after another as my jobs are moved to India, start ups fail, and so on.
So, I thought about the things I was putting off until retirement–family, history, story telling, and music–and realized I could make it all happen for myself right now. But I would have to move to a smaller community.
If Etzoni is right, many people may start reaching the same conclusion and more will come looking for you, small town South Dakota, rather than you recruiting them.
How cool is that!
January 9th, 2010 at 9:52 am
I don’t think banishing the phrase does much good if it describes an actual phenomenon. If it is a problem, we need to name it and solve it.
January 10th, 2010 at 7:42 am
I think the phrase has been useful precisely because it has made people uncomfortable and drawn attention to the issue. As an outsider who moved from California first to Minnesota then to South Dakota (which makes me pretty much an expert on what it’s like to be an outsider in South Dakota, despite having family history here), I think the polite Midwestern tendency to use soft language sometimes undercuts the ability to actually talk about problems. If people like myself with college degrees are moving into small or smallish communities but the original children of those communities who get college degrees are leaving, something is going on that needs to be fully understood and openly discussed.”Brain drain” may not be the right phrase, but we need to be careful how far we go for the sake of marketing.
January 11th, 2010 at 5:39 am
I’ve been a bit disconnected the last few days, so I’m going to have to catch up on a few comments all at once.
Cat: It would be very nice to see people moving to small towns without small towns having to “recruit” them. Do you think the general public is aware of what small towns have to offer? For the most part, it seems to me most people who haven’t lived in a small town before don’t “get” small towns, so they don’t see them as an option to achieve what you describe. For Collins is obviously much larger than the communities I’m talking about, but I think your blog has helped shape people’s understanding of your former community. (also, do you plan to blog about your new volunteer gig?)
Cory & Kelly: Part of what I appreciate about Ben’s research is that it shows us how much more complicated rural population movements are. Yes, we have people moving away, but there are other people moving in? And the people who move in have higher levels of education. Should we allow one element of this complex situation become the dominant point of discussion? And can we have that conversation about why young people are moving away without defining it as brain drain?
Kelly: You’re definitely right about not wanting to talk about our problems. Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to define all of what’s wrong with rural communities as a “lack of jobs”? it’s just not that simple.
January 11th, 2010 at 8:19 am
I live in a community which is a fairly easy commute to Madison, WI, which is the state capital and a large research university town. Although, statewide we have seen a “brain drain” of young people to Madison to live and work after college, we are also seeing a “brain gain” of these same young people back to the surrounding rural communities when they start to have families. I’m not sure how far from an urban center this phenomenon stretches, but I think there is a great benefit to providing third places that reflect the true and growing demographic in outlying rural communities. What seems to have happened organically is that these types of communities, which were rural centers in the previous century, have dying downtowns as parents live a more suburban lifestyle, driving to work, driving the kids to socker, etc. Our downtown has had uneven success in trying to appeal to this demographic mainly because it has not made a systematic effort.
January 11th, 2010 at 10:47 am
Mike, I too come from California. It seemed a lot of people romanticized about living in small towns, but thought it would mean lack of economic opportunity and sun. So, you still have plenty of awareness to work on. I was just being hopeful.
Fort Collins has no shortage of people moving here, and a thriving downtown. While a blog like mine might help with an overlooked town, I was trying to do something very different. As the town gentrified, I saw its agricultural and working class roots being swept away like an inconvenient toothless cousin. But I thought in those roots you could find exactly what made us different from Boulder, Portland, and so many other gentrifying towns. They gave us our sense of place.
Bismarck and Howard don’t have those issues. I’m especially interested to try to find the stories towns like this have to tell. That’s one reason I find this blog so interesting. You could be the next big movement after everyone figures out that new urbanism costs so much that nobody has time to walk/gather/third place on those charming clean and narrow mixed-use streets.
January 12th, 2010 at 6:44 am
Beth,
I think there’s a lot of similarities between what you describe and our part of eastern SD & western MN. Scale is probably the biggest difference. It sounds like Ben will try to dig up some data, so we should get a better understanding in the future.
As for third places, I read something from Michael Krassa recently that emphasized the importance of third places, civic engagement, and business vitality to main streets. Really liked the stuff and hope to dig in some more in the near future.
January 12th, 2010 at 6:47 am
Cat,
You’re right. Definitely no gentrification going on in this part of the country. You may also be interested in the work of the Kansas Sampler Foundation. Their blog provides a great overview of what small, rural communities can do for themselves — http://kansassampler.blogspot.com/.
January 12th, 2010 at 7:05 am
UW Extension is doing some research on third places that work. They are collecting data. Their results should be very interesting. I think one of the mistakes we’ve made is focusing so heavily on recruiting business, particularly retail business to downtown without accounting for how people actually live and what they do besides consumer activities. I’ve been involved in a number of market studies that focused on a retail gap analysis, where the results were plainly that there wasn’t a statistically significant difference in communities to use that as a basis of success. But, we had data to do that analysis. We were lacking in other data.
January 12th, 2010 at 7:07 am
I’m not familiar with Michael Krassa. Do you have a book or article title or online source for his work?
January 12th, 2010 at 7:23 am
Beth,
I just looked up th presentation I referenced and discovered that the link(http://uiuc.krassa.net/index_files/OBrien%20Conf%202.pdf) is not working. Here’s a link to his bio page at the U of Illinois — http://uiuc.krassa.net/. You can also find a lot of published info by searching for his name and “third places”. Sorry I’m not of more assistance. I hope you will share more of the UW Extension’s research into third places once its out. Sounds very interesting.
January 13th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
I would like to add more observations to Beth’s comment about downtown. In one of my architecture projects last year, we worked on a downtown in-fill project. In the project, our site’s previous building had burnt down and we were to create a three-story mixed use building with retail on the lower level, offices on the second level, and residential apartments on the third level.
One of our research topics was to study the active downtown of Bozeman, MT. We quickly realized that 8am, 2pm, 6pm and 9pm all attracted a very diverse group of people. In the morning, people were coming out of apartments and heading to work, stopping in coffee shops, etc. In the afternoon, many people were strolling around and shopping. By the evening, most were there with families to window shop and going in and out of restaurants. Finally, at 9pm the college students and the similar over-21 crowd came out to bar hop and enjoy the night life.
Like Beth points out, a lively downtown does not just come from more commercial or retail businesses. It needs a diverse range of businesses that will be open from early morning to late at night to sustain the people you hope to live there. Also, we noticed the parts of downtown that did not have this diverse group of offices, retail and residential did not have foot traffic down the sidewalks. But, the areas that did enjoyed plenty of both foot and car traffic.
January 19th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
I think the term “brain drain” can be useful and harmful when used different ways. Obviously it is describing a phenomenon that is actually happening and I don’t think that we help ourselves at all by ignoring the truth.
However, it has been shown that negative slogans are not effective at motivating people. Therefore, if we want to motivate people in small towns to encourage their youth to stay or return, we should focus on the great things about small towns, not on how negatively it’s going to impact us if they leave. We can’t guilt-trip our youth into staying, but if we show them what a great place they’re leaving, that is something they’ll remember!
January 19th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Annie,
Agreed. We should never try to guilt anyone into staying. But does that mean that we should focus so much attention the issue of 18-29 year-olds moving away when Ben’s research tells us that there are a lot of 30-45 year-olds moving in?
January 30th, 2010 at 8:29 am
Mike:
In the interviews I’ve done for my project on New Pioneers, I have been surprised to discover that many of these “brain gain” migrants are very intentional about how they choose where to live. They spend time on the Internet research student achievement in the local schools, they visit the community to get a feel for Main Street, and they look at what’s going on in the community. When they visit, they also get a sense for whether the community is welcoming or not — an important point that Ben Winchester raises. Communities interested in attracting New Pioneers need to spend time thinking about how they present themselves to these folks.
Thanks again for all the great stuff you post on ReImagine Rural.
Eric