DANVILLE, Ill. — This Illinois city was already struggling when Tara Holycross and her friends were kids riding their bikes to Custard Cup, swimming at the park district pool and hanging out in the Wendy’s parking lot.
Manufacturers that provided thousands of well-paying, middle-class jobs — General Motors, General Electric, Hyster — were closing. Neighborhoods were crumbling. By the time Holycross graduated from high school in 2004, a city best known for its massive downtown grain elevator was scrambling to create new opportunities.
Ten years later, this city of 32,500 is still struggling. But Holycross and some of her classmates are doing just fine — because they moved.
They’re doctors and athletic trainers, software specialists and financial advisers. They’re living all over the country — from Chicago to Charleston, South Carolina, to Boulder, Colorado — where they found solid jobs that reward the kind of education they have. Holycross and four classmates interviewed said about half of their class of fewer than 50 left town, and those they’re in touch with landed good positions.
“I knew there wasn’t an opportunity for me to have my career in Danville,” said Holycross, 28, a third-generation native who now works as an athletic trainer in Beloit, Wisconsin, about 90 miles northwest of Chicago.
Their experience is a counterpoint to the desperation gripping so many rural and manufacturing communities in the Midwest hard hit by global economic changes. The flow of educated workers from struggling communities to areas with brighter job opportunities might, to some extent, help shore up the middle class, which has been squeezed by a widening gap between the richest Americans and everyone else.
Since roughly 1980, income has grown most for the top earners and dropped for the poorest 20 percent. Incomes for the highest-earning 1 percent of Americans soared 31 percent from 2009 through 2012, after adjusting for inflation, according to data compiled by Emmanuel Saez, a University of California economist. For everyone else, it barely budged.
While Wall Street traders and software CEOs soared to enormous affluence, waves of people fell out of the middle class as manufacturing’s share of the economy shrank. Following the downside arc of the wealth gap was inevitable for many who stayed in stricken factory towns. For others, though, escaping meant separating their own fate from that of their hometowns.
Between 2012 and 2013, more than 26.7 million people age 18 and over moved — 17.3 million of them to a different county. Those in their 20s and 30s with a college degree were most likely to move for job reasons and to move the farthest. In that period, people poured out of declining cities such as Detroit, whose population dropped by almost 10,000, and into economic hot spots such as San Antonio, which grew by 25,378.
The trend of more-educated people moving and less-educated staying began to emerge several years ago. A Census Bureau study found that more than half of highly educated workers who moved between 2005 and 2010 left their counties. By contrast, 70 percent of people without high school diplomas who moved did so within the same county.
