"Brain drain," an assault on rural communities

I came across the phrase “brain drain” again in a book I’m reading about rural America. The book by Princeton professor Robert Wuthnow is called The Left Behind, Decline and Rage in Small-Town America. 

There’s a lot to talk about in the book and for me having grown up and then taught high school in rural communities, what he has to say makes a lot of sense. 

But, something about that phrase “brain drain” made me stop and think beyond his analysis. 

Wuthnow notes, as many others have also, that one of the factors sabotaging small cities and rural communities is called “brain drain.”

Simply put, the smart people move away to take advantages of opportunities that aren’t available in the little towns where they grew up. It's in the phrase. People with “brains” go to college and colleges train people with “brains” for what they deem to be the "brainy" work of America. As Withrow puts it, “Rural states and towns are left without college-trained young people to provide health care, teach, run high-tech businesses, and implement the latest agricultural innovations.”

Left without people with “brains.”

The social attitudes that support the idea and the phrase “brain drain” itself  imply that the people who are not smart are left behind, populating rural areas.  Rural areas and the people who populate them are treated accordingly, culturally, socially, and politically. Farmer and hospital technologist Cheryl Linden of North Dakota told Wuthnow that, “You’re looked down upon. It was always the dumb one who stayed home and farmed.” What I know about the people of rural communities contradicts that. Are modesty, pragmatism, problem solving, and an absence of pretentiousness characteristics of "dumb"?

My new thought here is that colleges are designed to deplete rural communities. Their mission is to suck out what they label by their own criteria as  “talent” and deliver it to their benefactors in large centralized locations. The ghost towns along U.S. 20 in northern Nebraska are the intended consequences of outside forces, not the result of community shortcomings. “These are not the places for college graduates to find jobs.” Wuthnow says. Why not? I wonder.

Rather than support the culture that’s already here, we send “smart” kids away to learn how to work someplace else and then we are told we are lucky when our public money and resources bring that “someplace else” back to the decimated rural communities in the form of large scale corporate operations that deplete the resources and culture of the place we preferred to begin with.

My own perspective on who is smart and who is not smart, on who makes a valuable contribution to their communities and who does not, on what constitutes “value” and what does not are skewed I suppose by the fact that I grew up and worked most of my life in a rural community. What does “smart” mean anyway? And what constitutes having a “brain”? 

My point is that along with the phrase “brain drain” being pretty insulting, it’s indicative of system that’s eradicating rural communities.