How you Gonna keep 'em down on the farm?

• Author: Sylvester, Jim
• Position: Moving Coving On?

Pssst. Did you hear why all the young people are moving away? They don't like the small-town gossip. Or the narrow-mindedness. Or the isolation from the rest of the world.

It's what social scientists call an "adverse social climate," and according to a survey conducted by The University of Montana's Bureau of Business and Economic Research, it's what nearly 20 percent of Great Plains residents like least about their community.

And no region of the country has suffered such drastic declines in population over the past two decades as has the northern Great Plains.

In the summer of 2001, the BBER conducted 2,896 interviews in eastern counties of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, and in North and South Dakota and western Iowa. The intent: To understand why people live in the northern Great Plains and why they stay or move away. The hope: That findings could be used to develop strategies which, if implemented, would reverse the negative trend.

Because young people are the most likely to move away, the interviews were timed to catch college students at home for summer vacation. To help with comparisons among the states, at least 400 interviews were conducted in each state.

Figure 1 shows the northern Plains counties that were sampled. The red counties reported population declines in the past 20 years. The few gray-colored counties experienced net in-migration; they are generally metropolitan counties or counties adjacent to metro areas.

Migration Patterns

Three out of four people on the northern Plains have some kind of "migration" experience. They've moved in-state or out-of-state, and sometimes back again. One in three have moved in the past, but not within the past 10 years. That's relevant because people who stay put for one decade are more likely to stay for another.

Twenty percent of the northern Plains residents interviewed last summer have moved within the same state, and 13 percent moved from a different state. Ten percent moved back to their home state.

What are the factors that make one person more likely to move than another?

As every parent knows, age is a significant influence--young people are oftentimes eager to fly away. The BBER's survey research provided the numbers.

As shown in Figure 2, if you can keep a young person in-state until they're 30, you may well have them for life. The proportion of those who had never moved declined with age; but the inverse was true for those who had not moved recently. In-state moves were...