I love my small town. I love walking along its one main street and recognizing every other face I see. Above all else, I love the forced connection that a tight-knit community brings. Because of this, even though my major is International Relations, I know I’m moving back to my hometown.
That being said, all anyone wanted as a high schooler in my town was to get out. We were two and a half hours outside of a major city yet trapped in a dinky town with a population less than 2,500, a median age of 66, and we were attending a middle-of-nowhere regional public high school with a graduating class of under 100. Our biggest source of entertainment was going to the only gas station for ice cream and sitting in its parking lot. At that time, everything felt so suffocating.
But looking back now, two-and-a-half years into my college education, I think high school might just be inherently kind of suffocating. Everyone I’ve met at Tufts felt like they had to escape. We all want to leave our hometowns because we are experiencing the very natural desire to become a newer and more authentic version of ourselves, something that’s much easier to do when we’re around new people, who have no prior expectations of us. Leaving home is nothing new; people have been venturing outside their towns to educate themselves since higher education became popular because of the first iteration of the G.I. Bill in 1944. But now they’re not coming back home. The smallest age demographic in my town is those between the ages of 25 and 29. It’s 111 people. That’s fewer people than I took Intro to IR with in my freshman year. And because of this, small town populations are aging quickly and local diners are beginning to resemble retirement home cafeterias.
The problem is that our education system is perpetually relocating talent. Those able to leave their small towns are permanently whisked away to the big and glamorous cities of the country. Opportunity is being concentrated in the same handful of places, intensifying already present regional inequities.
Of course, a large part of the reason why young people don’t move back to their small towns is because there isn’t always opportunity waiting for them there. Sometimes the nearest degree-related work can be hours away. It makes sense that people with the ambition to leave their home town also have the ambition to seek out a specific type of success. But it’s part of a more frustrating cycle. Young people leave because there are few opportunities, and then the opportunities disappear because there are so few young people, and then there are even fewer opportunities so even more young people leave. And then there are 111 people between the ages of 25 and 29 left in your hometown.
The only thing that can save our small towns is investment by their brightest. And in a way, it’s only fair that we match the investment we have received from our towns. It truly does take a village. Behind every student that escaped their hometown for higher education is a long list of people who supported them getting there. Teachers who took extra time to explain concepts, neighbors who overpaid for driveway shovels, community members who didn’t call the police when they caught you swimming in the creeks behind their houses. They were all pushing us toward being able to leave and better ourselves.
So even those in our communities understand why we’d want to leave them. And loving my small town doesn’t mean I think it’s perfect. At worst, small towns are small-minded places where privacy is unattainable and individuality goes to die. When I was growing up, my town was not exactly the most progressive. Now, there’s a gay bar fifteen minutes from my childhood home. I never thought that could be possible. The truth is that as much as small towns can feel like places where time stands still, that’s only when there’s no one around to keep it moving. If every open-minded person leaves their town for good, the town has no choice but to continue in slow motion.
We have the power to shape what our hometowns become, but for that to happen, we have to be willing to shape them. That might mean returning home after college instead of chasing something new. It might mean traveling the world or spending ten years trying out life in a city. At any rate, your community could benefit from the new ideas, new experiences, and new you that comes back home after college.
Artwork by Nicole Mousad.