New policy brief on rural Poverty from Wisconsin's Institute for Research on Poverty

"Many Rural Americans are Still Left Behind" was published earlier this month.  Among other useful information and features, Table 1 compares Rural Poverty in 1959 to 2016.  Here are three things that have changed since then:

• The rise of nonworking poverty in rural areas (prior to 2005, poor rural household heads were more likely to be working than their poor urban counterparts—this is no longer the case)

• Rural nonmarital childbearing, cohabitation, and single parenthood have all rapidly increased

• Immigrants increasingly are becoming isolated in high-poverty neighborhoods in rural communities

Here are three things that have not changed:

• The persistence of high-poverty counties that are disproportionally rural and continue to be geographically concentrated in Appalachia and Native American lands, the Southern “Black Belt,” the Mississippi Delta, and the Rio Grande Valley

• The persistence of higher rural than urban poverty rates (using the official poverty measure developed in the 1960s), with rural poverty rates exceeding urban poverty rates every year since 1959 

• The proportion of rural men who have earned a college degree has remained at about 15% since the 1980s