Small Colleges Can Save Towns in Middle America (2017)
bloomberg.com
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And besides, the towns that do get/have these institutions become gentrified and all of the the original residents get pushed to nearby small towns by professionals from more affluent regions.
In the end you end up with an upscale, expensive small town and surrounding depressed blue collar towns.
Source: I’m from a small town with a university.
Perhaps the assertion of racism isn't quite true, because to be really complete, you'd have to add ageism.
It’s also not the same as saying “I don’t want any old white people in this town”.
I mean, it's a racist personal preference. Caring about whether the expression of it is racist seems besides the point?
Among other things, it is certainly socially acceptable to date or socialize mostly with people inside your own race, and I don’t know of many people who would hold this behavior to be racist.
EDITS: wording, clarity. Apologies.
Gladly throwing myself in the pedantry to avoid the real discussion, the only reason we listen to other people at all is that their words are related to their thoughts and their actions. So, the reason you'd admonish someone for saying something horrible is that they indicated they were thinking something horrible, which gains status as horrible because it congruent with a mind that would do something horrible.
That said, I still do not think I would call it racism. Most of us prefer to be around people our own age when given the opportunity—for shared culture, lifestyles, etc. Is that ageist? I really don’t think that bigotry really applies here. It’s much more useful to apply solely to actions, which are easier to reason about. Discriminatory personal preference can certainly be harmful, but it seems like a distinct social phenomenon to bigotry.
More pedantry...
> So, the reason you'd admonish someone for saying something horrible is that they indicated they were thinking something horrible
No, the reason would be fear that they would act on their thoughts, or because their speech did affect people, not that their thoughts are themselves immoral.
Edit: To complete the pedantry, note that the end of my sentence brings it in line with the content your objection to the start of the sentence: >which gains status as horrible because it congruent with a mind that would do something horrible.
Similarly, it's not heterophobic to say "I don't want to work someplace where they don't hire gay people".
Agism or not, it's generally true that small towns with a lot of old people are typically towns in their death throes and white enclaves are typically practicing some form of racial exclusion.
Restaurants that serve cheap-eats (e.g. Chinese restaurants) tend to be ok since they have low overheads and are designed to handle peaking volumes easily (stir fries are easy, and most are family owned). But shoe, book retailers etc. will suffer in the summer when school's out, and in the winter when nobody's out and about.
First, the market clearly does not reward cheap education. A lot of prospective students and their parents are enamored with pricey colleges either for the status or for the perceived value. This is probably a result of cultural expectations lagging behind actual reality by a few decades.
Second, all the intermediary parties have no incentives to control cost. Student debt cannot be discharged under bankruptcy, so why would the lenders ever say no to any debt? They don’t care that the college is overpriced by a factor of 10 and the student will never pay off their debt fully, they’ll still pay 6-11% interest for the rest of their lives, which is highly lucrative for the lender.
Students and their parents need to have some difficult conversations: 1) How well prepared is the student for a given major? Remedial classes add cost but not credits toward the degree. 2) Does the student have a track record of finishing what they start? 3) Will the starting salary for graduates with that degree permit the student to pay their living expenses and their loan debt? 4) Are the time-to-finish estimates realistic? IIRC, the majority of students in 4 year programs actually take 5-6 years.
Higher education is in crisis. The State University of New York is talking layoffs. They are reasonably sound, if they feel the stress, what is it like at the Catholic College of Our Lady of the High Desert in northeastern New Mexico?
Many small colleges are going to go down in the next 5 - 10 years, and good riddance. They aren't providing a better education than the state school nearby, and they are more expensive. What's the point of Paine College when you can attend Augusta State University for less?
A dumb example would be a video game store. College kids have a lot of time and unlike most old people might want to pick up some games. Sure, there’s Amazon but second hand stuff is cheaper.
On a different level, you have stuff like auto repair shops, grocery stores, even gas stations that get benefits from a student population in an area. We all gotta eat after all. Stuff like parks can get use as well
And if even 1% stay and start a business in the area afterwards that’s still something that likely wouldn’t exist otherwise because people tend to start businesses wherever they are.
There is a bit of a risk of simply feeding the students into the nearest large city but even then you’re looking at 4 years of student loan money spent on various consumables in the area.
The biggest worry is indeed for real estate pricing.... which is why it seems very reasonable to force schools to build appropriate housing for their students instead of just relying on local stock.
They have an economic base - and often tax support - that keeps them from eroding as other small towns without colleges tend to. Their infrastructure tends to be reasonably maintained, whereas most non-college towns always struggle to upkeep even basic infrastructure. Crime and murder rates are typically between very low and moderate (and almost universally below what you see in large cities). Housing is extremely affordable. Connectivity is usually solid, another perk of the town having more resources and consistent economic activity.
Pikeville, KY is too small imo at just 7,000 people, however you can find a lot of other college towns / cities at more like 15,000 to 30,000 that have better lifestyle amenities.
UNH is particularly bad.
It's a complicated question but in today's world likely the answer is that the university will threaten to remove all their tax paying and the city will shoulder the burden entirely themselves.
Is there data for this? I spent a good chunk of my life in a mid-sized college town in the south, and last I checked the average home values there are eclipsing $400K.
Just some data points, pulling median home values in some college towns across the US off the top of my head:
Davis, CA: $641,500
Charlottesville, VA: $412,700
Chapel Hill, NC: $449,980
State College, PA: $316,600
Williamsburg, VA: $303,400
Berkeley, CA: $1,281,900
Wellesley, MA: $1,267,600
Davidson, NC: $360,000
Ann Arbor, MI: $360,300
Some of these aren't too bad, but I don't think they fall into the category of extremely affordable. Professors and doctors and all the folks associated with Colleges and Universities make enough money to drive up home prices!
Boston actually has a similar issue with students inflating housing, but it's diffused over a much larger population so it's less directly impactful. I think a large part of this is that since, as a parent, you're mortgaging your house to send your child to university anyways a few extra thousand for a nice apartment for them isn't too bad.
It’s probably fair to say that university towns see prices go up relative to their surrounding towns, but fundamentally almost any piece of real estate in rural Kansas is cheaper than coastal California.
Granted, this is merely anecdata, but I think it’s at least enough to challenge you to present actual data.
At this point it’s a question of which 5% of towns will consume the population of the remainder of their peers.
I expect a lot more closures and consolidations as tuition competition increases and students become more hesitant to take on debt.
We should want more consolidation so as to spend less on infrastructure creation and maintenance. 7000 is too small.
Also, it’s a land grant university. Those are big, old, and typically have great endowments.