Rural white Americans without a college degree dying "deaths of despair", may support Trump because of that despair - Entrepreneur Generations

"The data are clear: Life is getting harder and harder for Americans without college degrees. People with a high-school education or less tend to face worse economic prospects and have poorer health," Sarah Brown reports for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The increase in mortality among middle-aged white Americans who don't have a college degree is primarily due to "deaths of despair" caused by alcohol, drugs and suicide, according to researchers at Princeton University. President Trump won 67 percent of white voters without a college degree, a demographic that can be a rough analogue for rural America, and performed particularly well in counties with the highest mortality rates from these deaths of despair.

Dunklin County (Wikipedia map)

Is the despair connected to why people voted for Trump? Brown went to the Missouri Bootheel, a rural area in the southeastern corner of Missouri, to find out what the locals thought. In the Bootheel county of Dunklin, where only 10 percent of adults have a 4-year degree, 76 percent of voters went for Trump. The life expectancy there is 72.6 years, which is 6.5 years fewer than the national average. It's the kindBecause of job losses in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors over the past few decades, more people are relying on government assistance.

Brown talked to several people who expressed disdain for people who receive public aid because they're "too lazy to work". One man, David Ross, said that he has open positions at his trucking and excavation company that he can't fill. "If there were less government assistance, he says, maybe more people would be forced to take the jobs that are available, even if the work isn’t glamorous," Brown reports.

The town was devastated when Emerson Electric, the county's largest employer, closed in 2006 and sent many of its jobs to Mexico. So Trump's emphasis on bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. resonated deeply with many in Dunklin. Some pointed out that locals who do go to college don't tend to come back, since there are no high-skill jobs available in the area.

It's clear that boosting college attendance among small-town teenagers isn't a cure-all for rural America's woes, but some school districts are still trying to raise their numbers through various programs. One new program in Illinois, for example, will help 75 students at 10 rural high schools across the state access online Advanced Placement classes that can help prepare them for college and possibly award them class credit, The Associated Press reports. Advanced Placement classes can confer a big advantage to incoming college freshmen, but rural high schools sometimes don't have the resources to offer such classes. If the program is successful, Lt. Gov. Evelyn Sanguinetti, who leads the Governor's Rural Affairs Council, says they may expand the program to other schools in rural Illinois.

from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2mKIf9j Rural white Americans without a college degree dying "deaths of despair", may support Trump because of that despair - Entrepreneur Generations

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