Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. We will be taking the next edition off as we head into Christmas. Subscribe to stay in touch with us during the New Year.
Compared to their urban and suburban counterparts, a greater share of the rural population lives in states with the most restrictive abortion legislation, according to my analysis of data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that focuses on reproductive rights. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of 2022, it became harder for women to access reproductive care, but the burden often disproportionately hurt rural women.
About 46% of nonmetropolitan, or rural, Americans live in states with either ‘most restrictive’ or ‘very restrictive’ abortion legislation, representing 21.3 million people. Approximately 35% of metro Americans live in these states, representing roughly 99.1 million people.
State-level abortion legislation is complex; it’s rarely as simple as an outright ban or permit. Abortion policies can include stipulations like waiting periods, ultrasound requirements, gestational duration bans, insurance coverage bans, telehealth bans, and more. To deal with some of this complexity, the Guttmacher dataset groups states into one of seven categories that broadly captures the state’s access to abortion:
Seventeen states make up the ‘Most Restrictive’ category, and 13 of those states have enacted full bans with few exceptions. Those states include Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. The rural population in those states equals about 15.8 million people.
Rurality Exacerbates Access Challenges
In the Post-Roe landscape, pre-existing rural challenges are exacerbated by restrictive abortion legislation, a change that has led to increased maternal mortality, particularly for women of color. The new state of abortion in America means people often have to travel much further to get the care they need, often out of state.
An ABC special that featured women who had to travel for abortions highlighted the story of Idaho resident Jennifer Adkins, who was excited when she found out she was pregnant with her first baby. But a 12-week ultrasound showed that continuing her pregnancy would put her life in danger. With financial help from family and friends, Adkins had to travel to the nearest clinic in Oregon to receive the care she needed.
My previous analysis of abortion data showed that rural travel to abortion clinics increased from 103 miles on average in 2021 to 159 miles on average after Roe v. Wade was overturned. But travel distance varies by state, with women in parts of rural South Texas having to travel up to almost 800 miles to receive care.
In rural Louisiana, where all the bordering states have also issued abortion bans, the distance to a clinic has increased by almost 400 miles since Roe was overturned. The average rural Louisianan is about 492 miles away from the nearest abortion clinic. The data for that analysis came from the Myers Abortion Facility Database.
In 2024, approximately 12,000 Texans traveled to New Mexico to receive an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute data. Nearly 7,000 Texans traveled to Kansas, and another 4,000 traveled to Colorado. Texas enacted a near total ban on abortions in July of 2022. In Idaho, which enacted an abortion ban in August of 2022, 440 people travel to Washington and 140 travel to Oregon for abortions in 2024. (Visit the Guttmacher’s interactive map of abortion travel by state to explore the topic in more detail.)
Abortion and Rural Voters: More Complex Than You Might Think
Every time I write something about how rural people suffer from GOP policies, I get comments and emails from readers saying some version of, “They voted for this.” I take issue with this response for many reasons. It’s unkind, and it erases the thousands of rural voters who don’t support these policies. While some people are going to say you get what you deserve, here’s another way to look at it.
In a previous analysis of voting data from the nine states that had abortion on a ballot measure in 2024, I found that support for Trump didn’t always line up with support for abortion restriction. In 2024, approximately 73% of rural voters supported Trump, but only 61% voted to restrict abortion access.
While 61% is still a majority vote, the 12-point gap between support for Trump and support for abortion restriction demonstrates that abortion access is a complicated issue for many Americans across the geographic spectrum. This data shows a rural voting base that is willing to split with the broader Republican platform on key issues.
“All voters are complex,” said Nicholas Jacobs, rural sociologist. “People voted for [Trump], even if they wanted more access to reproductive care or were disappointed that a national standard was lifted by the courts.”
A newsletter about role of higher education in society — plus Open Campus developments.
Declining numbers of international students coming to study in the U.S. hurts local economies, according to new data released this week.
International students’ economic contributions declined by $1.1 billion this fall, costing the U.S. nearly 23,000 jobs, NAFSA and JB International found. Those figures are based on a 17% decline in international student enrollment.
Much of that decline was among graduate and non-degree students, according to the data. A slight increase in undergraduate enrollment this fall bolstered the overall numbers. There are still more than 1 million international students in the U.S.
It’s been a tense time for international students at colleges in the U.S. In the spring, President Donald Trump’s visa revocation and sudden reversal left many reeling, as our Jessica Priest reported in Texas. Trump has also limited visa interviews, told some universities to cap their international student enrollment, imposed travel restrictions on visitors from 19 countries, and made H1-B visas — which allow educated foreign citizens to work in “specialty occupations” — more expensive.
The U.S. must adopt policies to attract and retain international students and realize that job opportunities for them after graduation “are essential to our standing as the top destination for global talent,” said Fanta Aw, NAFSA executive director and CEO.
“Otherwise, international students will increasingly choose to go elsewhere—to the detriment of our economy, excellence in research and innovation, and global competitiveness and engagement,” Aw said in a release earlier this week.
Our reporters have been detailing the declines in international students on the campuses they cover — including DePaul University in Illinois and IU Indianapolis.
A separate report on international students released this week by the Institute of International Education found that their numbers were decreasing even before Trump took office: International student enrollment dropped by 7% in the 2024 school year, according to the report.
These declines matter — not just for college’s bottom lines, but for the broader economy. International students contributed $42.9 billion to the U.S. economy and supported more than 355,000 jobs last year, according to NAFSA.
The pre-Trump slump “suggests colleges face other headwinds, such as a slowing global economy, growing competition from nontraditional education hubs, and lingering unease because of the China Initiative,” in addition to current political turmoil, Karin Fischer, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s international education reporter, wrote in her newsletter this week.
India remains the country that sends the most students to the U.S. Marcello Fantoni, Kent State’s vice president of global education, travelled there last spring to talk with prospective students, our Amy Morona reported at Signal Ohio. He told them Kent State is still welcoming — one of the few things he can control amid the broader federal policy changes.
Still, he said Trump’s actions influenced how the students he spoke with viewed America.
“There is damage done there, and it will take a long time to be fixed,” he told Amy. “A long time.”
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Elsewhere on Open Campus
Shay Wiltshire, an intern at Land Rover and scholarship recipient, removes the splash shield from underneath a car on Nov. 6, 2025, at the Land Rover service center in Fort Worth. Credit: McKinnon Rice | Fort Worth Report
From Fort Worth: McKinnon Rice at our partner Fort Worth Report visited students who received paid, two-year auto technician internships through a partnership between Autobahn Fort Worth and Tarrant County College.
It’s a growing field in the area and offers opportunities to make good money without much college: “A technician hired after an internship starts out earning $24 to $30 per hour, based on their performance, and the wage grows as skills do — highly skilled technicians can make as much as $250,000 to $300,000 per year,” McKinnon wrote.
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How a billionaire’s plan to export East Texas groundwater sparked a rural uprising
The farmers and ranchers who descended on city hall in Jacksonville, Texas, had been told to “leave their pitchforks at the door.” While everyone ultimately arrived unarmed, the attendees of the June 19 board meeting of the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District were ready for a fight.
In the hallway outside the boardroom, wives tried to cool their husbands with handheld paper fans that flapped uselessly amid a sea of silver hair — stoic men with sweat-slicked brows beneath weathered cowboy hats, veterans’ insignia, and red MAGA ball caps. Near the chamber door, a uniformed officer stood sweating through his shirt, trying to enforce the fire marshal’s 150-person limit while the crowd swelled behind him. The sign-in table, barely visible through the crush, had already collected nearly 100 names — almost all were there to speak out against the water permits requested by two shadowy LLCs tied to hedge fund manager Kyle Bass and his investment group, Conservation Equity Management Partners.
The permit applications submitted by Bass’ Redtown Ranch Holdings LLC and Pine Bliss LLC collectively request permission to withdraw approximately 15 billion gallons of water annually from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer in East Texas, an amount residents fear will run their wells and farms dry. Without taking off their “Don’t Tread On Me” t-shirts, the citizens of six East Texas counties where Trump took around 80 percent of the vote last November are now turning to their state government to protect them from billionaires.
Residents pack the boardroom at the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District meeting in Jacksonville on June 19.
Reid Bader
Jacksonville sits about two hours southeast of Dallas. With a population just shy of 15,000, it’s the largest city in Cherokee County, one of the three counties represented by the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District. The trees in the county are lush and tall, and the Neches and Trinity Rivers gently flood the landscape with a predictability that local farmers use to their advantage. The county’s tight-knit residents typically vote Republican, they’ve told me over the years, to protect their freedom from government overreach. But as they watch water conflicts breaking out all over Texas, they feel their communities are being overwhelmed by heavy industry and profiteering. Some locals have started making the case that it’s not government overreach for the state to step in when the fight’s not fair.
Melisa Meador, who identified herself as a wife, mother, Christian, and pecan farmer with 600 acres near Bass’s Redtown Ranch — one of the LLCs looking to pump groundwater — took a prophetic tone in her testimony to the conservation district board. “Those who endlessly accumulate sow the seeds of their own destruction,” Meador said at the podium with the cadence and poetry of a revivalist. “Today’s water barons join river to river, well to well, until all water flows through their meters. Their thirst for profit can never be quenched.”
For his part, Bass feels he’s being mischaracterized. “I’m not coming at this as a robber baron, and I’m not coming at this as someone who intends to do any harm whatsoever,” he told me in the hall after taking a break from being public enemy number one inside the Jacksonville boardroom. “If they come back to me and say, ‘You’re going to do harm, you need to reduce your permit,’ I’m a very reasonable person.”
He’s not shy about his intentions for the water, though he insists that he does not already have buyers lined up. The water, should he get it, could be transported out of East Texas to any number of bone-dry cities west of the Carrizo-Wilcox. Unless the government wants to hang a “closed for business sign on I-35,” he said, there has to be some solution to the statewide water shortage. Really, he said, the amount of water he’s talking about exporting is a drop in the bucket — less than 1 percent of what the state needs.
Investor Kyle Bass leans forward to listen to a speaker at the meeting in Jacksonville.
Reid Bader
“I mean, we’re talking about a large amount of water in this area, but a very small amount of water as it relates to the state,” Bass said. “The state has a real problem.”
He’s right. Droughts have always been part of Texas weather, but with climate change, they’ve grown longer and hotter. Meanwhile, increasingly unpredictable torrents of rain are flooding canyons and tributaries, but doing little to refill the aquifers under parched, hard land.
West Texas is getting drier, heading toward all-out catastrophe for high desert cities and the state’s treasured spring-fed rivers. The Panhandle and Gulf Coast are scrambling for new water sources as agriculture and industry outpace local basins and aquifers. As drought conditions persist, the primary urban corridor, Interstate 35, has boomed with massive, thirsty tech companies that exhaust local water supplies in metropolis-adjacent exurbs. And the Edwards Aquifer — the massive limestone tank under southwest Texas — cannot support more growth, rendering San Antonio desperate for imported water. Like ravenous wolves, the thirsty cities are on the prowl for water. And there, underlying the lush forests and riverbeds of East Texas, sits the Carrizo-Wilcox — a big, juicy pig, with no one standing guard.
San Antonio struck first, running its 140-mile Vista Ridge pipeline and pulling 16 billion gallons per year from the Carrizo-Wilcox, causing wells in some rural counties to sputter. Fast-growing Austin suburbs also began sinking proverbial straws in their surrounding counties, laying pipe to keep up with exploding development. In Lee County, just east of Austin, the San Francisco-based water asset management firm Upwell Water announced plans to build a pipeline so big that the cities of Bryan and College Station, along with Texas A&M University, jointly filed suit to stop what they see as a groundwater grab.
There’s more to the pipeline-palooza than just competition for scarce resources. There are also fortunes to be made. Conservationists, well drillers, and even industry insiders have started comparing the rush on the Carrizo-Wilcox to the oil frenzy of the Texas Permian Basin or the California gold rush. But this time, the boomtowns won’t spring up next to the pumps. The real fortunes — and the real growth — are happening hundreds of miles away, in cities that may never lay eyes on the rural wells quenching their thirst.
Sitting on top of a gold mine doesn’t mean that every resident of East Texas could be about to strike it rich. The infrastructure to pump and export billions of gallons of water is more than most farmers and ranchers could afford — so they can’t drain their own land. Nor will water exporters need to pay them top dollar for their largest tracts. All an exporter needs is a couple of acres and some antiquated property rights.
In Texas, landowners enjoy the “rule of capture,” a doctrine based in Roman and Old English law giving them the right to harvest whatever groundwater flows under their property, even if it causes problems for their neighbors. This regularly did cause problems between neighbors — especially if one neighbor was an industrial farmer — so in 1940, Texas established groundwater conservation districts to serve mostly as monitors and arbiters. As regulatory bodies, they are ill equipped to impose strong enough penalties to stop an operation like Bass’. District boundaries often follow county lines, a demarcation which, many have pointed out, means nothing to the water flowing below. If the district tells you no in one county, you can just go next door.
Some in Texas, including some Republican lawmakers, would like to see that change. Following the June 19 meeting in Jacksonville, the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District ultimately opted to kick Bass’s permit request to the State Office of Administrative Hearings, a referee in complex regulatory fights that’s intended to give citizens, companies, and government entities a legal forum for high-stakes disputes — like who gets to pump 15 billion gallons of East Texas groundwater. The hearing has yet to be scheduled, in part because of lawsuits filed by many of the people and businesses who could be affected. But the outcry in Jacksonville sparked a growing awareness that every single Texas politician represents one of two kinds of places: districts that need water, or those that stand to lose it.
State Representative Cody Harris stands on the banks of the Trinity River in July. Harris has proposed an overhaul of the state’s century-old “rule of capture” law.
Elizabeth Conley / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
“We cannot compromise one region for another,” State Representative Cecil Bell said to another packed room, this time at the Texas State Capitol in Austin. The House Natural Resources Committee convened on July 15 specifically to talk about Bass’ permits, but found themselves wrestling with the statewide dilemma as well. The 11-hour hearing was like a marble and brass version of the Jacksonville meeting, complete with air conditioning problems in the Capitol annex. Many of those who showed up in cowboy hats to Jacksonville were now in suits and ties. In addition to the 13 members of the committee, six state representatives and two state senators stayed seated on the dais until nearly midnight — a startling show of interest in a topic usually delegated to staffers and lobbyists.
That night, several expert witnesses and more than one state representative suggested that it might be time to rethink the rule of capture and move toward a more modern means of regulation that can balance the needs of neighbors and water systems across the state. But property rights in Texas are sacrosanct, and folks in rural Texas don’t necessarily trust the government — even the one they voted for — to regulate in their favor.
Industry veteran Johnnie Parker, owner of a wastewater cleaning company near the area Bass wants to pump, attended the hearing in Austin — he was one of the few attendees who’d stuck with jeans and a ball cap instead of a suit — and expressed doubts about whether the Legislature or even the State Office of Administrative Hearings would ever side with rural East Texas. “To me it’s a circus when it comes to these hearings and what not … there’s a lot of things that happen behind closed doors that the general public doesn’t get to see,” Parker said, sitting on a bench in the vaulted, echoing hallway outside the hearing. He rubbed his fingers together to indicate the power of money. “Until the Legislature gets together and decides they want to change the laws on how these things are regulated, this is just a smoke screen.”
Johnnie Parker speaks at the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District board meeting in Jacksonville.
Reid Bader
Most of the testimony indicated that regulation should fall to the groundwater conservation districts, which would need “more teeth” to protect their jurisdictions. That might be the most politically feasible way forward. The Legislature this year already raised the maximum fine allowed for overpumping, from $10,000 to $25,000. It also considered a bill to increase funding for groundwater research, which could help develop tools for better real-time monitoring of water levels in high-demand aquifers like the Carrizo-Wilcox. High-quality monitoring could give the groundwater conservation districts the data they need to say no to big projects that are deemed unsustainable. Additional legislation could help those denials hold up in court when property owners dispute them.
Representative Cody Harris represents most of the area where Bass wants to pump and also happens to chair the Texas House Natural Resources Committee. After the hearing, he filed two bills in the special legislative sessions Texas convened in July and August — one bill to prohibit water exports from East Texas and another to fund a study of the Carrizo-Wilcox to determine just how vulnerable it is to over-pumping. The clock ran out on both bills, but Harris feels confident they will fare well in the 2027 Legislature, which many expect to be dominated by water issues.
But the Austin hearing underscored an uneasy feeling growing in some rural communities. While the science and governance of millions and billions of gallons were extensively debated, barely a question was asked about the millions and billions of dollars to be made selling that water. Back in Jacksonville, speaker after speaker had scoffed at the idea that Bass would walk away from profit if it hurt his rural neighbors. But in Austin, it was only Parker, out in the hall, talking about the influence money would have on the future of water in Texas. For him and others raising concerns, the water wars are the latest example illuminating the power big money can wield over politics when regulation — usually anathema to free-market conservatism — isn’t strong enough to keep it in check.
This tension between political principle and existential threat was evident back in Jacksonville at the hearing on June 19, when Miria Dean — who lives two miles from Redtown Ranch — chatted with others who’d arrived too late or given up trying to get on the list of speakers inside. She told me she saw Bass’ plans as “greed, pure and simple.” What’s legal and what’s right aren’t always the same, she said. Then she paused, smiled, and added, “Happy Juneteenth, right?” We regarded each other, both taking in the significance of the holiday that happened to coincide with the hearing. Slavery was once legal in this country, but it had never been right.
When I asked who should intervene to stop Bass, Dean recoiled at the idea of big government. But her stance was more complex than that. “We still want the government’s hands off. We don’t want their nose in our business. We want them to step in, but only as far as we want them to step.”
Even capitalism, the guiding ethos of small government, is no longer a free pass. “Capitalism is a great thing,” one speaker said at the Jacksonville hearing. “Unfettered capitalism is bad.” The crowd applauded.
BISD’s $39 million bond for new school passes in Nov. 4 election
By Carla McKeown and Tony Pilkington/Breckenridge Texan
Breckenridge Independent School District voters approved a $39 million bond Tuesday to build a new elementary school, according to the preliminary results released by the Stephens County Elections Office on Tuesday evening, Nov. 4.
The unofficial totals show 886 votes in favor of the bond and 638 votes against. Early voting and absentee voting accounted for 447 votes for the proposal and 342 against.
The Stephens County elections staff checks in ballot boxes Tuesday night, Nov. 4, at the courthouse. The unofficial results were posted outside the tax office as soon as they were calculated.(Photo by Tony Pilkington/Breckenridge Texan)
The bond, which will fund construction of a new school building to replace aging facilities, marks a major milestone for the district after months of community discussion. The school is planned to be for students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade and will replace both East Elementary and South Elementary.
BISD Superintendent Prairie Freeman said she was grateful for the community’s support. “It’s great for the kids at Breckenridge,” she said after the results were announced.
“The community showed up for the kids, so that means a lot,” Freeman said. “We’ll start with the designing and planning phases from here, and then we’ll start construction either late spring or early summer, depending on materials and … weather and things like that.”
Freeman called the victory emotional, crediting local volunteers for their work to pass the measure. “I can’t thank them enough,” she said. “They did it for the kids here in this community.”
Kelsey Cornwall, a parent of three BISD students and treasurer of the Buckaroo PAC, which supported the bond, said she’s excited for the school district’s opportunity to build a new school.
Cornwall said she hopes to continue participating in the process as the project moves forward. “I’d like to be on the bond committee, the Bond Oversight Board, or whatever they’re gonna call that.” she said.
While she was pleased with the outcome, Cornwall said the narrow margin surprised her. “I thought it would pass by a wider margin. I know there were a lot of people that didn’t like the location, but notwithstanding, I thought it would pass. But we had great turnout. That’s what we wanted, right? One step at a time,” she said.
Jaclyn Morehart, who served on the BISD facility planning committee, said she was surprised that so many people turned out to vote in the election. “I’m excited for a new school, complete with all the updated safety features,” she said.
The Breckenridge Texan will provide updates as the district begins the design and construction process for the new school.
Cutline, top photo: Kelsey Cornwall, Prairie Freeman and Brian Kight look at the election results that were posted at the Stephens County Courthouse on Tuesday night.(Photo by Tony Pilkington/Breckenridge Texan)
North Texas community votes against forming a city to regulate a noisy Bitcoin mine
Some Hood County residents wanted the same power that cities have to set noise limits, but did not secure enough votes.
SNAP cutoff could hurt Texas grocers and the rest of the economy, experts say
The ongoing government shutdown means more than $600 million per month won’t go to millions of Texas SNAP beneficiaries who pump that money into the state economy.
Stephens County leaders launch emergency plan to aid SNAP recipients during federal shutdown
In-depth look at BISD’s proposed $39 million bond for new elementary school
An East Texas landowner fenced off a community’s favorite fishing spot, igniting multiple legal battles
Phillip Surls, a local businessman who owns much of the property around the Cutoff, has argued he blocked access to the stream to protect his cattle and that the waterway is not public.
A North Texas community will vote to form a city in an effort to quiet down a crypto mine
Leaders of the effort say they moved to rural Hood County for its quiet country charm, which was shattered by what locals call “that roar” from the facility.
