Bureau County has experienced a brain gain in the last 40 years, joining the rest of the country in what has been a massive increase in the number of adults who have earned college degrees.
In 1970, 7.5 percent of those over 25 years of age had college degrees in Bureau County. By 2010, 16.1 percent of adults here had completed college.
The percentage of adults with college degrees in Bureau County was less than the national average of 27.9 percent in 2010. The college-educated rate here was less than the Illinois average of 30.3 percent.
The number of adults in the United States with college degrees has nearly tripled since 1970, when only 10.7 percent of adults had graduated from college. But the percentage of adults with degrees in counties with small cities, such as Bureau County, while increasing, has generally fallen behind the proportion of college-educated residents in urban counties.
The loss of young, well-educated residents has posed a long-standing difficulty for rural communities.
“One of the problems that rural areas face is that in order to get a college education, young people often have to leave,” says Judith Stallmann, an economist at the University of Missouri. “Once you leave, that introduces you to other opportunities that you might not have seen had you not left.”