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Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
When I tell people that I write about rural America, I often get asked, “So, you write about agriculture?” But anyone who has spent considerable time in rural places knows that rural economies are more complex than that. Rural counties with economies dependent on farming make up less than a quarter of all nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties, according to my analysis of USDA data. And the share of the rural population that is actually employed in agriculture is in the single digits. (And farming articles make up an even smaller portion of my total writing.)
When I write about rural economies, I try to bring more complexity to the table. In this edition of the Rural Index, I’ll be analyzing bachelor’s degrees across different county types. I wanted to know if there was a difference between what rural and urban residents studied in college.
This data is from the American Community Survey, a dataset from the Census Bureau which publishes five-year averages at the county level for a variety of measurements, including poverty rates, education levels, housing, income, and more. The file I’m using for this edition of the Rural Index shows the field of the respondent’s major (or first major, if they had more than one) among college graduates over 25 years old.
(Keep in mind that this dataset does not show whether or not the respondents captured in the survey are still employed in their respective fields.)
This graph shows the percentage of college graduates with degrees in different industries. The top left graph illustrates the total share of all four-year college graduates over 25 years old. The other three graphs show college majors broken down by age group.
(Note: The county categories in the following graph are based on the Daily Yonder’s usual binary system of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties, but the metropolitan counties are broken up by size. Major metro core areas are cities in counties that have more than one million residents. Medium-sized cities are in counties that have populations between 250,000 and one million residents. And small metros have populations fewer than 250,000 residents.)
For most industries, there was not a whole lot of variation across county types. Look at the top left graph. The largest variation across different geographies was in education and science/engineering. Science/engineering majors made up 38% of all college graduates in major metro areas, but only 30% in rural counties, which had the lowest share of those majors.
But the opposite was true among education majors. Education majors made up nearly 20% of all college graduates in rural counties, and only 8% in major metros. The share of college graduates that majored in education increases with each smaller geography.
This didn’t surprise me much. We know that fields like education make up a greater share of the economic activity in rural areas compared to urban and suburban areas. In a lot of small towns, the public school system is the largest employer.
But younger age groups are less likely to have degrees in education. Here’s a more simple graph that focuses only on education majors.
In rural counties, 28% of the college graduates over 65 majored in education. That number dropped to 18% in the 40 to 64 age group and 13% in the 25 to 39 age group.
The following graph shows the percent of all education majors that were over 65 years old. Close to 40% of all education majors were over 65 years old across all county types, according to my analysis.
This tracks with other data about employment trends. A 2022 Pew survey found that fewer college graduates are earning degrees in education compared to previous generations, a trend that affected women in particular. In 1970, 36% of all bachelor’s degrees among women were in education, compared to only 6% today.
This is not just a rural problem. An aging population of education majors is happening amid nationwide teacher shortages. According to a data analysis from the Learning Policy Institute, a research and advocacy group, there were 45,582 unfilled teaching positions in 2025 among the 31 states that report position vacancies. They estimated that approximately 365,967 teachers who were hired were not fully certified for their positions.
A scarcity of qualified teachers hits harder in rural schools. Meanwhile, retention is also a problem. Compared to their urban and suburban counterparts, rural districts have a harder time filling vacant positions and reducing high turnover among the teachers they do hire. According to a Kappan analysis of data from the Schools and Staffing Survey, teachers in rural schools were twice as likely to move to other geographies compared to metro teachers.
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