Community and family, not professional skills, drives moves to the country, U of M study shows

Professionals and people with business management skills may be moving to the countryside, but they often wind up not using those skills to make a living.

Whether that's because they can't find the work or because using those skills isn't that important to them, this is perhaps the most interesting finding in the latest "brain gain" research done by University of Minnesota sociologist Ben Winchester.

Rural residents for decades have been wringing their hands about the "brain drain" -- the best and brightest packing up after high school and heading for the bright lights.

Winchester, a research fellow in the university extension center for community vitality and a resident of Hancock in western Minnesota, for a while now has been pitching the notion that people shouldn't worry so much about the youth draining away and focus instead on the "brain gain." By that he means the people in their 30s and 40s who either are returning to rural areas or are moving there for the first time.

The Economic Development Administration at the U of M Crookston has just published the result of a set of interviews Winchester directed last year of some 53 such newcomers to five western Minnesota counties -- Swift, Lac qui Parle, Big Stone, Chippewa and Yellow Medicine. Some arrived from places as far away as California and Pennsylvania; others were from the Twin Cities.

Winchester's goal was to recommend some strategies for encouraging that behavior -- how communities can make better information available, how to encourage job creation and telecommuting possibilities, how to support the newcomers once they arrive.

But why move? Residents told him they were worn down by the city, wanted self-employment, liked proximity to family, were interested in farming, were looking for a good place to raise kids. People seemed to talk a lot about community and family; not so much about professional advancement.

Specifically, almost half of the people interviewed said they had skills in business management. The same number said they had professional skills. But only about half of those people said they were using those skills in their jobs in rural Minnesota. On the other hand, those newcomers with health care skills seemed to be putting them to use in their jobs.

I'm not sure whether the findings say more about rural Minnesota or the people interested in living there.

The late Bill Holm once wrote about his (and, until I was 10, my) home town of Minneota that nobody ever moved there after being a success somewhere else. Holm meant that as a suggestion that we think differently about failure and success.

The people Winchester talked to perhaps have taken that suggestion to heart.

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