The Partial Observer by Alex Thomas

There’s More to County Population Decline Than Meets the Eye…

School has recently begun and, if you are of a certain age, you may be wondering where all the students went. Back in the day, I graduated from CCS with a class of 107; last year it was, well, a lot less. The long-term trend is similar across the county, with public school enrollment dropping by over 25 percent as shown in the table. What’s happening?

To start, we need to look to demographics, specifically the oddity of how the New York metro area is expanding. In 1950, the New York City suburbs were largely contained within Westchester and Rockland Counties, but since have expanded well into upstate New York. In 2003, Ulster County was classified as part of the New York Combined Statistical Area, which is fancy census-speak for telling you that when you get out of the car in Kingston, Saugerties, or Woodstock you are in the metro area.

One measure of this growth is contiguous townships with at least 10,000 residents, roughly the size of Oneonta or Herkimer, and in the last census (2020) that zone had expanded as far north as Liberty. In the 1960s, Liberty was part of the famed “Catskills” resort land north of the city, but today it is an exurb and the zone of tourist towns and recreational housing has pushed farther north. In some areas of Delaware and Schoharie counties, half or more of all housing units are classified “seasonal/recreational.” In contrast, we around Cooperstown have it comparatively good. Nonetheless, the dearth of available housing units has resulted in higher housing costs.

The increase in housing prices would be more manageable with a larger variety of good-paying jobs. Since the mid-20th century, the region between Oneonta and Utica of which Cooperstown is part has lost tens of thousands of jobs in manufacturing and transportation, part of a larger trend of such loss across the Northeast and Great Lakes. The shift to such services as healthcare, education, and tourism has helped this picture but not fully replaced what has been lost. The result of both increased housing costs and the demise of industry resulted in a decades-long trend of stagnation and even decline in population as former residents flee to regions that have benefited from upstate New York’s malaise. Faced with a stagnant population (read: market), the region has failed to attract the types of investment in housing and jobs prevalent in the Sun Belt and, for that matter, the New York Metropolitan Area. The result is a vicious cycle that results in more disinvestment and population stagnation.

Of course, people who no longer live here can’t send their kids to school here, but only 67 percent of the population loss is outmigration. The decline in fertility rates accounts for about a third of the loss: in 2019, the average woman in the county had only 1.3 children, which was the lowest fertility rate in New York that year. Since it takes two to have a child, that doesn’t even replace the people it took to have the child. To be fair, about 12 percent of the county’s population is college students, and they tend to move elsewhere before they have kids.

Declines in local school enrollments are the end result of decades of changing economic and social patterns, and thus turning them around requires a systematic approach that acknowledges the complexity of the issues involved. In terms of housing and employment, an approach that integrates economic development with community development should aim toward stitching together a regional economy that will incentivize our children to stick around. In terms of our low fertility rate, there are perhaps some things that don’t need to be discussed in a family newspaper like this one.

Alex Thomas is professor of sociology and executive director of the PLACES Institute at SUNY Oneonta. If you would like more information, read the report “Adapting to Change: The Challenges of Population Change and Educational Programming” at places.oneonta.edu.