Rome didn’t fall in a day

Some local officials were busy whistling past the graveyard last week, or more accurately quibbling over whether Youngstown is the poorest medium-size city in the nation or the fifth or seventh poorest.

The exact rank matters little, unless someone actually wants bragging rights to being the lowest. The city was once the center of an industrial complex that produced one of the highest household incomes in the country, and now it is unquestionably among the lowest.

Youngstown was then a symbol of what post-war America was — a place where a man with a high school education or less could make more working in the mills or on the railroad than a lot of college graduates earned, and certainly more than anyone working in civil service.

And Youngstown today is a symbol of what America has become. A nation where Americans still work hard — see the Labor Day story and editorial — but where the nation’s wealth comes not from the durable goods it produces, but from the intellectual property it develops.

While America was changing, Youngstown and the surrounding area did not adapt, at least not quickly enough. And as America evolved into an information economy, Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley lagged behind in the one thing that equips people to compete in that economy — education.

The education factor

The same census statistics that report Youngstown’s woeful income levels, also document the under-education of its population.

It is impossible not to see a correlation.

Youngstown has a median household income of $21,850, give or take a couple of thousand dollars. It has a high school graduation rate of 73.2 percent and a college graduation rate of 9.7 percent.

Mahoning County has a median household income of $36,784 (based on the latest available figures, 2004). The county has a high school graduation rate of 82.4 percent and a college graduation rate of 17.5 percent.

Ohio has a median household income of $43,371 (in 2004). The state has a high school graduation rate of 83 percent and a college graduation rate of 21.1 percent.

The pattern is obvious, and it’s one that has been accepted as conventional wisdom from generation to generation: Education is the path to earning a better living.

Of course, nothing is quite as simple as that, and there is evidence to support the argument that Mahoning Valley residents aren’t doing a terrible job of seeing to it that their children are educated. The problem is that parents send the kids off to school, and the kids never bring their degrees back home.

It becomes a vicious cycle in which educated people don’t return or migrate to the area because there are no jobs for them, and there are no jobs because there aren’t enough educated people to attract high-tech industries.

There are some efforts being made to break the cycle, locally and in Columbus. And it is important that those efforts be pursued and expanded upon.

Youngstown did not go from being a high-wage area to a city with one of the lowest household incomes and highest poverty rates overnight. And the trend will not be reversed overnight. But if it isn’t reversed in time, there will be no dawning of a new day.