What the research says about bringing young people home to Appalachia and keeping them there
[Editor’s Note: James Branscome is the author of Annihilating The Hillbilly Redux: Appalachia’s Struggle Against America’s Institutions, a “profoundly important book for the field of Appalachian studies that shares the author’s personal experiences, his insights, and evidence-based understanding of the ways and means by which the Appalachian Region has been historically exploited.”]
Every spring in the coalfields of Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee, high school seniors walk across a gym floor, and every fall a good share of them leave.
That was true in my own Blue Ridge county when I graduated from Hillsville High School in 1964, and it has been true in the coalfields ever since. What is new is that the leaving no longer explains most of the loss.
Earlier this year I reported in the Kentucky Lantern that 29 of Eastern Kentucky’s 30 coalfield counties now record more deaths than births. In a single year, Pike County buried 427 more people than it welcomed as newborns.
The young people who left a generation ago took their children with them. The children who were never born here cannot come back.
That is why the question of how to keep young people in Appalachia, and how to bring some of them home, is no longer only about brain drain. It is about whether many of these communities will keep enough working-age people to remain viable communities fifty years from now, with schools, clinics, volunteer fire departments and a tax base to pay for them.
This study synthesizes what university researchers, state auditors, and program evaluators have learned about why rural young people leave, who returns, and which incentives actually change behavior. It takes a hard look at Ascend West Virginia, one of the country’s most celebrated relocation programs, and asks whether it brings natives home.
Then it sets out a proposal that builds on the Appalachian Homestead Act I first published in the Daily Yonder in 2016 and revised in 2025. The new piece is an income bridge, borrowed from the basic income experiments, that would carry young families through the years when mountain wages cannot.
This is the third installment in a line of work. My Homestead Act proposals asked where returning families could live. “One Mountain Over” asked who might come home. This study asks the question that remained: what would allow them to stay.
The arithmetic of a vanishing region
The Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 estimates, released in March, tell the story county by county. Kentucky’s 30 coalfield counties lost 16,265 people between 2020 and 2025, about 2.5 %. Only Whitley County had more births than deaths in the latest estimated year, and by just 16.
West Virginia is further down the same road. Its 16 Central Appalachian counties lost 32,041 people over the five years, a 5.2 % decline and about double Kentucky’s rate. This count includes Greenbrier County. My April analysis in West Virginia Watch, which included Cabell instead, put the loss at 33,796.
Virginia’s seven coalfield counties lost about 4 %. Tennessee’s former coal counties gained population, a reminder that geography is not destiny.
Kentucky as a whole grew by about 100,000 people in those five years. But without people moving in from other states and countries, the state would have shrunk by about 18,000 because deaths outran births, WEKU reported.
Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy, has tracked this pattern for more than a decade. His 2025 brief found that deaths exceeded births in nearly 72% of all U.S. counties between 2020 and 2024. Natural decrease is far more common in rural areas, and he found it in 82% of nonmetropolitan counties, up from 54% before the pandemic.
His earlier work found that nearly nine in ten counties that experience natural decrease once experience it again. Once a county ages past a certain point, the cradles do not catch up on their own.
The second part of the arithmetic is money. Economists writing in the University of Illinois’ FarmDoc Daily found that government transfer payments made up 17.6 % of all personal income in the United States in 2022. West Virginia led the states at 28.9%, and Kentucky was fourth at 24.8%.
In 24 counties, transfers were more than half of all personal income. Eighteen of those 24 were in Eastern Kentucky or southern West Virginia.
The King Institute for Regional Economic Studies at King University in Bristol put Southwest Virginia’s figure at 34% of household income in 2019, before the pandemic, and Northeast Tennessee’s at 28%. A 2018 report from the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce found transfers above 60 % of personal income in Owsley and Magoffin counties in 2016.
Most of that money is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and disability. It follows the old and the sick. Those checks did not drive the young away. Transfer payments are less a cause of the coalfields’ demographic problem than a measure of it: the income of an older and less healthy population left behind by decades of out-migration and weak earnings.
It pays to keep a grandmother in her home. It pays nothing to keep her granddaughter in the county.
The region as a whole has made real progress, which makes the coalfields’ situation starker. The Appalachian Regional Commission’s 2026 Chartbook, drawn from 2020 to 2024 census survey data, shows poverty falling and income and education rising across the 423-county region. Still, median household income in Appalachia was $66,555, about $14,000 below the national figure of $80,734. About 28% of adults held a bachelor’s degree, compared with 35.7% nationally.
Rural Appalachian households also lag in broadband access, with 83.7% subscribing compared with 91.1% in the region’s large metro areas. That gap matters to any strategy built on remote work.
Why young people leave
The scholarly literature on rural brain drain is larger than most people realize, and more useful than the phrase suggests.
The best-known book is Hollowing Out the Middle by sociologists Patrick Carr of Rutgers and Maria Kefalas of Saint Joseph’s University, published by Beacon Press in 2009. With MacArthur Foundation support, they moved to a small Iowa town in 2001 and spent parts of several years interviewing young people who had grown up there, wherever they went.
They sorted them into four groups. Achievers were the college-bound students the town groomed to leave. Stayers were mostly working-class young people who went to work locally. Seekers left for the military or anywhere different. Returners came back, some quickly and some after building careers elsewhere.
Their most uncomfortable finding was that the town’s adults did much of the pushing. Teachers, parents, and community leaders poured their attention into the most promising students and, in effect, told them that success meant going away.
Anyone who grew up in an Appalachian county seat will recognize the pattern.
I certainly do.
