Robert Cushing/Census This chart divides the nation's adult population into four equal groups each decade. The 1st quartile (green line) are the quarter of U.S. adults in the counties with the highest percentage of those over 25 with college degrees. The 4th quarter are those adults living in the counties with the smallest percentage of people with college degrees. You can see that since 1970 the gap between the most and least educated counties has widened significantly as the nation has sorted educationally.

The country is growing increasingly unequal in the location of its educated residents.

The percentage of people in the U.S. who have a college degree has increased dramatically since 1970. Both rural and urban counties have seen a dramatic increase in the percentage of their residents who have at least a college degree.

But the distribution of highly educated people has grown increasingly unequal. People with college degrees are clustering in some counties and not others — a demographic divide with serious economic consequences.

This was not the case 40 years ago. In 1970, the distribution of people with college degrees was fairly even across the country.

Since then, however, counties have become increasingly dissimilar when it comes to educational attainment. In particular, the group of most highly educated counties has zoomed far ahead of everyone else.

You can see that happening in the chart above. Our friend Robert Cushing ranked counties each decade since 1970 by the percentage of adults with a college degree, highest to lowest. Then he divided those counties into four equal groups of adults (those over 25 years of age) — four groups, or quartiles, each with about 50 million people. 

Jeff Roberson/AP Carlin Bennett, Presiding Commissioner of Mississippi County, MO, and U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson having just learned that the Corps of Engineers planned to blow up the levee and flood 130,000 acres, May 2, 2011.

On the morning of May 2, 2011, the swath of southeast Missouri along the Mississippi River, from the mouth of the Ohio south to the Kentucky Bend, was rich, productive cropland, saturated by the wettest April on record.

What a difference a day makes. By the morning of May 3, 2011, the region had become an artificial lake, 20 feet deep in places. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had blasted open the mainline levee outside Cairo, Illinois, activating the  Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway. While neighbors to the east and north breathed sighs of relief, many who farmed or lived within the 130,000 acre floodway felt the breath knocked out of them. When, if ever, could they return to their land and to life as they had known it?

But what a difference a whole year makes.  As of May 3, 2012, the Corps has rebuilt most of the mainline levee to a height of 55 feet and plans to restore it to its previous height of 62.5 feet within the year. A project to clear the sediment from 108 miles of drainage ditches is in progress.

Despite well-founded fears that flood-borne pollution, silt, and erosion might render the land unfit for cultivation for years to come, farmers managed to plant soybeans just weeks after the water receded. According to Sam Arnett, director of the New Madrid County University of Missouri Extension, they produced a harvest that would have been considered average, even under normal circumstances.

To be sure, the land and people continue to experience repercussions and will for quite some time.  Much eroded land remains to be restored, and large sand deposits make other land inaccessible.  The community of Pinhook, sadly ruined by its submersion, has yet to be rebuilt. Some landowners and public officials are frustrated by the pace at which federal agencies are funding or carrying out reconstruction work and by the red tape involved. 

Daily Yonder/Census Purple counties had a higher proportion of vets than the national average of 9.9 percent. Green counties were at the national average or had a smaller proportion. Click on the map to see a much larger version.

Military veterans disproportionately live in rural and exurban communities. And vets who live in cities are much more likely to live in smaller urban areas, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census.

Military veterans are least likely to live in the centers of the nation’s financial, political and media power — New York, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Those areas have among the lowest percentages of veterans in the population of any of the nation’s communities.

Rural and exurban counties were home to 30.6 percent of the nation’s 22.6 million veterans. But these same counties represent just 25.9 percent of all residents over 18 years of age.

Military veterans make up 11.7 percent of the adult populations in rural and exurban counties. In urban counties, however, vets are 9.3 percent of those over 18.

(Exurban counties are in metropolitan regions, but nearly half of the people living there are in rural settings. These are counties that lie on the edge of larger metro areas.)

Nationally, 9.9 percent of the population over 18 years of age has served in the military. The map above shows counties that are above the national average of 9.9 percent in purple. Those with vets at or below the national average are in green.

Click on the map to see a much larger version.