Search

This paper tests the hypothesis of chance selection in migration to cities from agriculture. The data used concern the economic and educational conditions among 477 city and farm families in Minnesota, and the migrations of 401 young adults. Farm families hold their children longer than urban families. All classes who keep children in agriculture give them less formal education than the children sent to the cities receive. Formal education may not be used as a measure of the quality of the population for purposes of testing selectivity. There is no evidence of a net selectivity unfavorable to agriculture, but some suggestions of assortative mating. The most important element in the urban upper classes was the children of the farmers; next was the children of the upper classes themselves; and, finally, the children of the lower urban classes. Occupations other than agriculture are composed out of the most heterogeneous groups. The first-born in agricultural families shows a preference for agriculture, whic...

Migrants from cities to farms come primarily from the artisan class. Their economic ability, as shown by incomes and living expenditures, is about equivalent to that of native farmers. They are better educated than native farmers. Twothirds of them take up farming because they intermarry with farm children. A comparison of the net migration between cities and farms by economic and social groups gives the net law of rural-urban social selection: the cities attract the extremes while farms attract the mean strata in society. This is a mere hypothesis. This study concerns itself with the social origin of migrants from urban occupations to Minnesota farms and gives some conclusions as to the segregation of definite types of populations in farm and urban areas through this interchange of people. The data used are the same as in the second article in this series.2 They include the families of 694 Minnesota farmers who gave information for a study of rural living made by J. D. Black and myself as a part of the research program of the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station. The sample includes all types of Minnesota farm population and is representative of the agriculture of the state. It was found that in 536 of these 694 families both the operator and his wife were children of farmers. In 30 cases both parents were from urban families, while in I28 cases the operator or his wife had married into a city family. Thus, in 128 families recruits had reached agriculture through sex selection. These consisted of 8i town women and 47 town men who had married into 1 This is Paper 7I7, Journal Series, Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Minnesota. 2 See the first and second articles in this series in the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXXII (November, 1926), and Vol. XXXIII (July, I927).