Education and Income

Many people argue you should get more education to earn more money. Others think it goes beyond that. And still others believe that income causes education more than education causes income. And the income that causes education is the type that then causes income. Got it? Good.

This map shows US Counties in 1970 (top) and 2011 (bottom), for all intents and purposes*, and the percentage of adults who had a high school diploma or less in those years. You can hover over a county to see the data in a popup box.

Use the filter at the top right to select counties by their 1970 rate to see if they've made progress. You'll probably find that almost every county has; those that used to be dark blue are now lighter blue, or even orange. Select the highly educated counties in 1970 (any small city with a Big 10 University would do) and you'll see they're still up there, as you would expect. So that's good.

But after doing that, use the second filter to select counties by per capita income in 2011. What do you see? Anything we can hypothesize about what this might tell us?

*The data are county level data from The Rural Atlas (education) and Census Bureau (income). Data listed as 2011 are actually from the American Community Survey, 2007--2011.

Learn About Tableau

Comments

Changes in AP Scores, 2022 to 2024

Used to be, with a little work, you could download very detailed data on AP results from the College Board website: For every state, and for every course, you could see performance by ethnicity. And, if you wanted to dig really deep, you could break out details by private and public schools, and by grade level. I used to publish the data every couple of years. Those days are gone. The transparency The College Board touts as a value seems to have its limits, and I understand this to some extent: Racists loved to twist the data using single-factor analysis, and that's not good for a company who is trying to make business inroads with under-represented communities as they cloak their pursuit of revenue as an altruistic push toward access. They still publish data, but as I wrote about in my last post , it's far less detailed; what's more, what is easily accessible is fairly sterile, and what's more detailed seems to be structured in a way that suggests the company doesn...

The Highly Rejective Colleges

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be. His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges." As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office. The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look: The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl...

Changes in SAT Scores after Test-optional

One of the intended consequences of test-optional admission policies at some institutions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to raise test scores reported to US News and World Report. It's rare that you would see a proponent of test-optional admission like me admit that, but to deny it would be foolish. Because I worked at DePaul, which was an early adopter of the approach (at least among large universities), I fielded a lot of calls from colleagues who were considering it, some of whom were explicit in their reasons for doing so. One person I spoke to came right out at the start of the call: She was only calling, she said, because her provost wanted to know how much they could raise scores if they went test-optional. If I sensed or heard that motivation, I advised people against it. In those days, the vast majority of students took standardized admission tests like the SAT or ACT, but the percentage of students applying without tests was still relatively small; the ne...

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog