There's no denying the correlation. People are who poor are also less likely to have a college degree. People who are poor are less likely to have parents who have a college degree. There is a negative correlation between poverty and education.
Without an education it's hard to break out of poverty. Social mobility in our society depends on skills and credentials that are usually obtained through higher education.
So why don't poor people simply go to college and get better jobs so that they can stop being poor?
If you've never lived with, in, near, or around poverty that question sounds incredibly rhetorical. It's not rhetorical. And there are obvious answers – obvious to anyone who's looked poverty in America in the face…
I went to college because it was expected of me. No one ever so much as acknowledged the idea that there was some alternative. I teach kids who do well enough, in a community where college is a long way away and many people who go to college never come back. Some parents expect that their children will go to college, many don't, and some hope and pray that their children don't go to college – because if they do, then they will probably move away.
To be truly prepared for college a child needs to run through school pretty much without skipping a beat along the way. And yet many children from poor families show up already behind. I was fortunate enough to be able to provide my own children with small libraries in the preschool years. I valued literacy and books. I read to them. But in a poor community books often don't mean very much. And children show up for school sometimes without having ever even touch one for themselves before they arrive.
Because they start out behind, their progress is slower. Because their progress is slower, they get farther behind. Because they're farther behind, their progress gets slower…
Eventually, expectations get lowered. And the kids succeed in living up to those lower expectations.
My masters thesis was to be on something called the Human Capital Theory. I did much of the research, but a problem delayed release of the 2000 Census by just long enough that I ended up with a nn-thesis degree… Adam Smith first gave voice to the Human Capital Theory – the idea that the more training (or education) someone has, the more money they are likely to make. It works – unless you impose geographic restrictions. When confined to a local economy that is economically depressed, the relationship between training and income breaks down. And poor people know that.
The argument becomes circular: you're poor because you didn't go to college, and you didn't go to college because you're poor. Financial aid, TRIO programs (I've worked for them), scholarships – they become irrelevant to a large degree…
Call me a liberal if you will. I believe the Third Law of Thermodynamics applies to economies. Without the input of outside energy and resources, everything just kind of cools down. Appalachia, like most poor geographic regions in America, needs more than education to escape the grasp of poverty. The best most secure, decent paying job where I live is still mining coal. You can do that with a high school diploma.
Poverty will continue to be the norm in rural Appalachia until some outside force decides to improve the infrastructure and take steps to incubate jobs. Maybe it will be state government; maybe it will be federal government. But it won't happen just because the economic development commission of Tazewell County, VA, tries a little harder…
