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In 2004, about 17 percent of US residents, 50 million people, and 75 percent of US land area, was classified as nonmetropolitan. Some 2,052 of the 3,100 US counties are considered nonmetro, and almost 1,500 of them gained residents between 1990 and 2000, especially nonmetro counties in the Mountain West, Pacific Northwest, Upper Great Lakes and eastern half of Texas.

About 300 rural counties are considered "recreational counties" based on employment in recreational employment, the number of seasonal houses and other indicators; these areas often attract immigrant workers seasonally, such as Walworth county, Wisconsin, with Lake Geneva. Retirement rural counties, on the other hand, tend to create more year-round jobs.

Nonmetro counties on the Great Plains of the Midwest generally lost residents in the 1990s; many of these counties had fewer residents in 2000 than they had in 1900. For example, Jewel county, Kansas, which straddles the corn and wheat belts, had 19,400 residents in 1900 and 3,800 in 2000, a third of whom were over 65.

About 82 percent of the residents of rural America were non-Hispanic whites in 2000, eight percent were Black, and five percent were Hispanic. Hispanics contributed 30 percent to rural population growth in the 1990s.

Some 6.5 percent of the residents of nonmetro counties were employed in farming in 2000, compared to 12.4 percent employed in manufacturing (about 8.4 percent of urban workers were employed in manufacturing). Most of the farming counties are in the Great Plains, while the manufacturing counties are concentrated in the Midwestern and southeastern states.

In 1920, a third of US residents, 36 million people, lived in the 2,052 counties that remain rural today; these counties had 50 million residents in 2004. During most of the twentieth century, urban counties added residents much faster than rural counties, except during the 1970s, when rural counties grew faster than urban counties. Net rural-urban migration peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, but rural counties gained a net four million residents in the 1990s, primarily as more US-born residents moved to rural counties. Young people tend to leave rural counties, while older people tend to move to rural counties.

Some rural counties have been transformed by immigration. Surry county, North Carolina, on the Virginia border 25 miles north of Winston-Salem, has seen its furniture and textile mills close and its poultry industry expand. Hispanics are 80 percent of the workers at Wayne Farms, which processes about 30 million chickens a year in the county seat of Dobson. Hispanics outnumber Blacks in the county, and 25 percent of K-12 students in Dobson are. School administrators say that ESL funds are provided on counts of migrant children, but few workers migrate.

Surry county is seeking alternative industries, including wine grapes to replace tobacco and retirees seeking low-cost living. The textile mills that used to dominate the area's economy helped to prevent new industries from moving in to avoid bidding up wages. With the mills closed, some retirees are attracted to well-preserved Americana.

Schools. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires schools with low-performing students to offer private tutoring free of charge. However, private tutoring firms are often reluctant to serve rural areas with few students, leaving schools with the option of on-line tutoring or none at all.

The idea behind NCLB was that, especially for students in failing schools, private firms would provide services in a flexible and cost-efficient manner as an alternative to vouchers which would have allowed parents with children in failing schools to send them to private schools at public expense. In urban areas, competition between private firms to provide "supplemental education services" is intense, but these firms have shown little interest in providing services in rural areas.

States certify firms to provide tutoring, but some private tutoring firms require, for example, a minimum 1,000 children needing extra assistance. The private firms that operate in some rural areas hire local school teachers and pay them extra to moonlight as tutors, leading critics to complain that the same system that failed is trying to fix its mistakes.

Johnson, Kenneth. 2006. Demographic Trends in Rural and Small Town America. http://www.carseyinstitute.unh.edu/