Dwindling Numbers of School-age Children in US Cities

As the income gap becomes more pronounced in US cities, the number of school-age children is dropping as families move out to the suburbs. In 2018 about 12 percent of children aged 17 and under lived in the principal city of a metropolitan area, down from 14.6 percent in 2010. In addition, data from the national Census Bureau’s American Community Survey shows that the percentage of children aged five and under in these central cities fell from 16 percent in 2010 to 13.9 percent in 2018.