10/26/98

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

"Where Have All the Children Gone?"

The loss of children from a community is often used as a powerful emotional symbol of community decline or failure. The outmigration of young people, for instance, is often blamed upon the failure of the local economy to provide enough well-paid jobs even though the outmigration of young, well-educated, people is high in rapidly expanding as well as stable or shrinking communities. Young people tend to set out to explore the rest of the world no matter what the economic conditions in their home towns. A new version of this concern about Montana communities being able to hang on to their young people emerged over the last several years when elementary school enrollments began to decline despite ongoing population growth. One explanation offered for this phenomenon was that the low wages and high cost of living in Montana’s urban areas made it impossible for young families to live here. As a result, families with elementary school children were being forced to leave the state in order to raise their families in something other than poverty. The state’s major newspapers have endorsed this explanation for declining elementary school enrollments.

Before jumping to the conclusion that it is primarily poor economic conditions that are responsible for the decline in elementary school enrollments, we should at least consider one other powerful force affecting our population, plain ordinary demographics and the shifting age structure of the population. One part of our brain is well aware of how important a change in age structure can be. We are constantly talking about the "baby boomers," that large bulge of babies born after the Second World War, who are now moving through the age structure into late middle age, affecting everything from politics, to culture, to the mix of workers and retirees.

But that is only one of the more dramatic examples of how differences in birth rates in the distant past can affect us now and in the future. The federal government’s current population projections for the next 20 years predict that between 1995 and 2000 the number of 5 to 10 year age olds in the United States will decline despite ongoing growth in the US population. That decline in younger children will then move through the age structure over time leading the age 10-13 group to decline between the years 2005-2010 and the age 14-17 group to decline between 2010-2020. At the same time these declines in school age groups are projected to take place, the total US population will grow by 63 million. This, of course, is not due to young families being forced to leave the United States due to poor economic conditions but simply due to changes in birth rates. It appears that Montana is simply a half decade ahead of the nation in this demographic phenomenon, possibly because Montana’s population is significantly older than that of the nation.

There is an easy way to test whether it is past differences in birth rates or differential outmigration of young families that is behind the decline in elementary school age populations in Montana. We can look at the number of children in each one year age category in the early 1990s, freeze that population, and simply allow it to age one year at a time to see what the size of the elementary school age population would have been in the late 1990s. This amounts to modeling Montana as if it were closed to in- and out-migration. If one does this, one finds some interesting results.

First, even with zero outmigration of young children, the number of elementary school age children would have declined significantly in Montana and Missoula County during the second half of the 1990s. Second, there has been a significant amount of inmigration of school age children, not outmigration. It has been young families, on net, moving into the state that have kept the decline in elementary school populations from being even greater than they actually were. That is, the impact of migration has been the opposite of what many have speculated: It has been supporting elementary school enrollments, not reducing them.

There is a thin element of truth to the idea that outmigration of young families has had an impact on school enrollments. During the second half of the 1990s, net migration into Montana and the Missoula urban area has declined dramatically. For the state it appears to have actually turned slightly negative. As a result, inmigration is not playing the powerful expansionary role that it did for elementary school enrollments in the early 1990s. This has allowed the underlying low population of young children from the late 1980s to dominate school enrollments. In that sense migration is playing an important role in the fluctuations in school enrollments, but it is not a matter of young families being driven from Montana in recent years but an overall decline in inmigration. Of course, the low population of young children in the late 1980s could be blamed on the poor economy back then and there would be some truth to that, but just as important was a demographic force, the decline in birth rates that accompanied the passing of the "echo" of the 1950s baby boom.

It is good to see public commentary focused on the well-being of our children. But rather than twisting that healthy concern about the next generation into a speculative attack on Montana’s changing economic structure, we should be focused directly on the many children living in poverty, the children who are not covered by medical insurance, and the ongoing under funding of the schools upon which those children rely to be productive and competitive in the next century.