See Here

Education is the most important thing that makes Yankees different from the rest of us (see previous post). A deeper look at the numbers shows that states in the Northeast and New England may be pulling even further away from the rest of the country in this regard, with one exception. Meanwhile, the least educated region has moved from South to West.

As part of the continuing research program of ePodunk’s Institute for Northern Studies, I looked at the educational attainment of young adults (aged 25 to 34) and older adults (aged 65 plus) in each state. I looked at both ends of the education mill, finding the proportion of young and older adults who do not have a high school diploma and the proportion who have a four-year college degree or more.

This exercise shows that the Deep North is still doing the best job of making and keeping eggheads. Every state in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions has a higher-than-average share of young college grads, except for Maine. The state with the highest share of young college grads in 2005 is Massachusetts, where 45 percent of adults aged 25 to 34 have four-year degrees. States number two through four are New Jersey (40 percent), Connecticut (39 percent), and New York (38.5 percent). The national average for this age group is 30 percent.

Things get even more interesting when you look at the bottom end. The state where young adults are most likely to be high school dropouts is Texas (where 21 percent of adults aged 25 to 34 do not have a high school diploma), followed by Nevada and California (at 20 percent each, compared with a national average of 14 percent).  These three states also have more than half of the nation’s Hispanic population.

The numbers also show that South’s “dumb hillbilly” reputation is becoming more of a media creation than a fact. Nine of the top ten states with the highest share of adults aged 65 and older who do not have a high school diploma are in the South: 41 percent of Kentucky’s elderly are dropouts, and the figures are almost as dismal for Mississippi (38%), Tennessee (37%), Louisiana (36%), West Virginia (36%), Alabama (35.5%), Arkansas (34%), South Carolina (34%) and Georgia (33.5%). But this cohort is now dying off, and younger Southerners are doing far better.   Only four of the top-ten states for young high school dropouts are in the South. Six are in the West.

It is a truism here at the Institute that the North’s fascination with Southern culture is yet another example of the privileged making fun of the poor.  If this is what’s really going on, we can all look forward to the next version: a Mexican edition of Hee-Haw.

The need to adapt to cold weather certainly makes Northerners different from the rest of the United States. But over-education may be a more important factor in the traditional “Deep North” states of New England and the Mid-Atlantic, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Northern Studies (see post). After all, people in Manhattan and Fargo, ND both must guard against frostbite – and yet, very few North Dakotans read The New York Review of Books.

Five of America’s ten most-educated states are in the Deep North. They include top-ranking Massachusetts, where 37 percent of adults aged 25 and older have a four-year college degree, plus Connecticut (35 percent), New Jersey (34 percent), Vermont (32.5 percent), and New Hampshire (32 percent). New York and Rhode Island are also above the national average of 27 percent, and the least-educated states in the region (Pennsylvania and Maine) are not far below the national average (at 26 percent). As a result, people who live north of the Mason-Dixon Line are more likely than the rest of us to dwell on the benefits of eating tofu, calculating compound interest, and other abstract concepts that normal people find hard to grasp.

One by-product of the education gap is that Yankees are more likely to have money. New Jersey has the highest median household income of the 50 states ($61,672 in 2005), and six of the nine Northeastern states have median incomes above the national average. Another consequence is that Northerners tend to avoid short-term pleasures that have bad long-term consequences. Connecticut has the lowest smoking rate of any state except Utah, and four other Northeastern states are also near the bottom of this list (fewer than 20 percent of adults smoke in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont). Northeastern states have some of the nation’s lowest divorce rates, as well as the lowest rates of church attendance. Go figure.

Several correspondents at the Institute for Northern Studies have commented that they find Northerners to be smug and irritating. Unfortunately, the facts show that they are also smarter, richer, healthier, and have happier relationships than the rest of us. One promising area for future research might be devising ways to take their stuff.

If you enjoyed this attempt to mix wit and statistics, you might also like Cheryl Russell’s blog, Demo Memo.

Linton Weeks is the Founder of the Institute for Northern Studies because he said it first when were jiving around several years ago. I am the Executive Director because I have kept a manila folder labeled “Northern Studies” in my desk since he said it. Linton is a Memphis boy and a reporter for the Washington Post; I am from rural Florida, and I work for ePodunk. This means that we both have professional reasons to read highly technical socio-cultural analyses of the Southern states. It also means that we both have personal reasons to smirk while we read the stuff. So we decided to do a little think tank judo. This here is a call for papers, y’all.

Maybe you know about Southern Studies already. A list at Ibiblio.org describes at least three major academic centers that are exclusively devoted to studying the American South, plus several dozen Southern websites. You can page through these sites whenever you want to ponder Dolly Parton’s hidden feminist messages or read about William Faulkner’s personal habits or hear the distinctive field hollers of Alabama turnip farmers. In fact, excessively thoughtful people have been writing about the peculiarities of Southern culture ever since W.J. Cash wrote his first editorial for the Wake Forest student newspaper back in 1921. But where do you send your article if you want to write about the charming peculiarities of the North?

I’ve been living in upstate New York for 27 years now, and there are still some things I just can’t get used to. Two weeks ago, people in the small town of Whitney Point were heartbroken because they had to cancel an ice fishing competition called the New York State Crappie Derby. Several thousand people had been expected; the motels were booked full for miles around. Contestants were going to drive for hours to walk out onto a sheet of ice, drill a hole, drop a line, and wait all day in sub-freezing temperatures for an edible sunfish to take their bait. Then they would have to scale and gut these small, bony fish with numb, wet hands before enjoying the reward: a real Crappie dinner. Maybe a trophy. But it has been an unusual winter. People were grumbling because it had not been cold enough for the lake to freeze over. Does that seem normal to you?

The North can be a confusing place if you aren’t tipped off to its ways. For example, it is traditional to eat Crappie with salt potatoes, which are thumb-sized spuds harvested early, boiled in brine, and served in a bowl drenched with butter. They are delicious – a gym sock is also delicious if it is drenched with butter – but if you aren’t from Central New York, you probably don’t know what they are. A five-pound bag of Hinerwadel’s Salt Potatoes is really just potatoes with a 12-ounce packet of salt enclosed to add to the boiling water. I recently heard about an uninformed woman from Geneseo, NY who bought a bag, saw the packet, and called the cops. She thought that Hinerwadel’s was smuggling cocaine.

I know several Southerners besides Linton and I who have moved up north and are intrigued by bowling leagues, scrapple, arguing as a form of recreation, and other forms of Northern culture. I hope they’ll be chiming in. If you would like to share an observation about Yankees and their distinctive folkways, we at the Institute would like to visit with you about that. What have you noticed? –Brad Edmondson