Mississippi State University President Mark Keenum shared a sobering statistic about the state’s population loss during a visit to Columbia this week.
Keenum said there were 30,000 high school graduates in Mississippi this year, but by 2022 there is expected to only be 27,000. That’s a 10 percent drop in just four years.
“We’re one of the few states in the country where our population is declining,” Keenum said in remarks to the Columbia Rotary Club.
His conclusion is that the state must grow its economy to attract and keep people here and that the best opportunity to do that is through the state’s colleges and universities. They produce skilled workers who are able to create new companies and be assets for the existing businesses they work for.
He’s right, but there are many other factors at play as well. Those include the state’s lack of a true urban area, since most of the growth now is in metropolises like Nashville and Birmingham. Jackson doesn’t quite qualify as that and has many well-documented struggles. Nevertheless, improving the capital city is a key for the whole state.
Also, the state’s population must start valuing education more, starting at the lower grades. Too many children start off behind because their parents don’t read to them and talk to them in their preschool years like they should. That’s a simple thing to do, but it’s extremely hard to change the culture to convince people to do that.
Finally, the state needs to expand Medicaid. Medicine is perhaps the fastest-growing economic sector right now, and the aging Baby Boomer population means it will continue to be so as that massive demographic group requires more and more care.
Expanding Medicaid would provide a billion dollars a year, bringing more clinics and doctors into Mississippi, courtesy of taxpayers from the rest of the country.
But the state has stubbornly refused to accept the money because it was part of Obamacare. That has only hurt ourselves, especially rural hospitals. Those hospitals had their payments for treating indigent patients cut in anticipation of those patients getting Medicaid as part of the expanded program. However, because the state has declined to accept the federal money, they’re out of the money without getting anything in return.
Of all the ways to get the state’s population moving in the right direction, that’s the quickest and easiest one to implement.
— Charlie Smith
