Agreed on education being the major liberalizer, both as the ability to be in someone else's shoes ad critical thinking (the two of which being what one gets from a 'liberal education').

The people with education end up moving to places where they can find employment. Often these are somewhere near an urban area or urban.

The 'gotcha' is that higher education is no longer cheap / free. So someone without economic resources is faced with the choice between crushing debt and no higher education.

As I do have an education, I could get into why higher education is now do expensive (TLDR: it doesn't scale) but that's to the side.