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Fiscal Trends and Enrollment Change in Rural School Districts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2017

Theodore R. Alter  and
Dan E. Moore
Theodore R. Alter
Affiliation:
Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University
Dan E. Moore
Affiliation:
Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University
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Extract

Until recently, the dominant demographic trend in the United States had been an increasing flow of people from rural to urban areas and a concentration of population in the nation's cities. Early in the 1970s, however, it became clear that this historically dominant trend had been reversed. People were leaving the cities for the countryside, and nonmetropolitan areas were experiencing higher population growth rates than metropolitan areas. The now familiar “turnaround” along with the socioeconomic characteristics of metro to nonmetro migrants and their reasons for moving has been well documented in the literature (Beale, 1975; Zuiches and Brown; Fugitt and Voss). Most evidence indicates that this trend emerges from a decline in metropolitan growth rates and an increase in nonmetropolitan growth rates originating twenty to thirty years ago, and is likely to be with us for some time into the future (Fugitt and Voss, pp. 10 and 37).

Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Journal of the Northeastern Agricultural Economics Council , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , October 1980 , pp. 102 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association 

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Footnotes

This paper is No. 6050 in the Journal Series of The Pennsylvania Agricultural Experiment Station. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the following persons from the Division of Education Statistics, Pennsylvania Department of Education, in providing the necessary enrollment and finance data for our analysis: George E. Cole, Paul C. Shatto, and Dominic R. Lattanzio. We also thank Diane P. Krantz, Patty T. Jones, and Andrew Gianoulades for their help in preparing the data for analysis. In addition, critical reviews by Sam M. Cordes, Patrick J. Madden, and three anonymous reviewers made important contributions toward improving the initial draft of this paper. Any errors in analysis or interpretation, of course, rest with us.

References

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