Rethinking the Historical Rural Education Advantage in the U.S.: Evidence from Linked Complete Count Censuses, 1900 to 1940

Michael Lachanski, University of Pennsylvania

A remarkable and repeatedly replicated rural school participation advantage in the pre-Great Depression period U.S. confounds both historians of education and contemporary and contemporary social scientists. Was the rural advantage real? Did it extend to the years of schooling measures used in contemporary education research? I investigate this question by linking the 1900, 1910, and 1920 full count Census records of aged 5 to 19 youths' school attendance to the full count 1940 Decennial Census, the first to record the highest grade of schooling completed. I document the following three stylized facts. First, a simple period measure of county-area school participation predicts county-area mean years of schooling completed. Rural county-areas were nearly an order of magnitude more likely to underperform the years of schooling predicted using the measure than the city county-areas. Second, I replicate earlier findings that age specific school participation propensity at high school ages was decreasing in local population size for non-Southern states all else equal at high school ages, but the reverse was true at younger ages. These patterns are robust to detailed controls for region, race, ethnicity, nativity, and socioeconomic origin. Finally, select age-specific school participation advantages for rural students did not translate into elevated educational attainment relative to any other size group. The negative effect of rurality remains after controlling for local unemployment, region, race, nativity, and detailed parental socioeconomic origins. The rural educational disadvantage is robust to reweighting, not explained by internal migration patterns, and does not depend on the inclusion of the Confederate South. In the pre-Great Depression U.S., elevated measures on the age-specific school participation statistics used in prior studies of school system expansion may not always have signaled increased educational opportunity.

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 Presented in Session 204. Educational Landscapes and Policies: Challenges in Historical U.S. Contexts