New England Region & Its Culture

New England consists of the six states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. They cover 66,672 square miles, or two percent of the total area of the United States. New England is about the size of one Midwestern state, and indeed, it has been noted that it probably would be one state had America been settled from west to east. The region has more than 6,000 miles of shoreline, roughly 200 ski areas, and more than 800 campgrounds. The population stands at approximately 13 million people, or about five percent of the U.S. population. Two states-Vermont and New Hampshire--accounted for more than 70 percent of the net increase in population in New England during the first half of the 1990s. In most New England states, the number of high school graduates declined steadily during the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the region is now in the midst of a modest demographic rebound. The number of New England public high school graduates is expected to grow steadily from 112,100 in 1996 to 135,710 in the year 2005, after which the number will drop off once more ("The state of New England: A fact sheet," 1999).

New England's racial and ethnic profile is changing rapidly. AfricanAmericans, AsianAmericans, Hispa

cluding fabricated metals, then electronics, then computers. The region developed a celebrated series of academicmedical centers that gave it a crucial competitive advantage in the emerging biotechnology industry of the 1980s. At the same time, nationally prominent environmental research helped create New England's environmental technology industry. Today, possible industries for future economic growth include aquaculture, photonics, and a range of informationbased industries. The region boasts 46 percent of its jobs in service industries, such as "business services" including advertising, management consulting, software, and insurance; and "consumer services" including entertainment, education, and health care, and the size of this workforce has grown by four percent annually since the late 1970s. Over the same period, manufacturing's share of New England's total employment dropped from about 30 percent to less than 20 percent ("The state of New England: A fact sheet," 1999). New England provides a disproportionate share of total U.S. employment in certain industries, among them investments (31 percent); securities and commodities (19 percent); pension, health and welfare funds (16 percent); life insurance (five perce