MINNEAPOLIS _ Sylvia Hilgeman grew up no-frills on a farm in Red Lake County in northwest Minnesota, where flat fields are broken by steel grain bins, stands of aspen and abandoned farmhouses.
Her dad cultivated rented land and her mom raised cattle and milked cows at a neighboring farm to help pay the bills. They raised their children in a double-wide mobile home across a gravel driveway from her great-uncle's homestead.
"My parents, they worked harder than anyone I've ever met," Hilgeman said.
The work paid off for their children. Sylvia went to college, got a job in accounting and later joined the FBI. Today, she investigates white-collar crime in New York City.
Compared with cities and suburbs, it is much easier to move up into the middle class from rural Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska. Well-off and hard-up kids go to school together in small towns. They come of age in tight social networks that run through extended family, neighbors, church, school and fields. They feel pressure to work hard and succeed.
Among these rural communities, Red Lake County stands out. Children born there into a family in the middle of the bottom half of the socioeconomic ladder have, on average, landed better off as an adult than 6 in 10 Americans in their age group, according to an analysis by economists at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.
The numbers are more similar to Scandinavian countries, which score particularly high in this regard, than to urbanized areas of the United States.
"The rural areas seem to produce really good outcomes for kids from low-income families," said Raj Chetty, an economist now at Stanford who led the research. "Minnesota actually looks very much like Denmark."
While the recent presidential election spotlighted frustrations among the rural middle class about wage stagnation and dimming economic opportunities, children from low and middle-income families in rural areas have been more likely to reach the middle class than their urban counterparts.
The catch is that many of these kids achieved prosperity only by moving out of farm country. The small towns of the Midwest, where opportunity is highest, are less and less the places where most people live, or where poor children grow up.
Only 10 percent of Minnesota's last generation of children grew up in high-opportunity counties, and that share is gradually shrinking.
"You need a certain kind of critical level of human beings to make a community work, to have enough people in your church and your school, and have all the township officers and all those different things," said Sylvia's dad, Greg Hilgeman. "Grain farming does not employ enough people."
