Skip to main content

Educational Attainment in the US, 1940--2013

The last half of the previous century was an astounding time for increasing educational attainment in the United States.  In 1940, for instance, the majority of adults had an 8th grade education or less; 13% of the adult population never made it to fifth grade.  And in 1940, if you had a college degree, you were special indeed: Only 5% of all adults were so privileged. The first interesting point is the effect of compulsory education through high school.

Many people believe the rise in family incomes and quality of life is related to educational attainment, although which is the cause, and which is the effect is subject to interesting debate.  It's pretty clear, however, that the end of World War II was the turning point.

This visualization started out very complex, but I decided to make it simpler in the end: Choose an age category and, if you like, a smaller subset of years.  Compare men to women in educational attainment, and see how that changes over time.

I'm drawn to the 55+ age group: The baby boomers and older.  Notice how college degrees exploded over time for both men and women, but how men in this group are still more likely to have a college degree or more.  Now look at the other age groups: In the younger categories, women have surged ahead, or, depending on your perspective, men have fallen behind.: That's the real story here.  And with enrollment rates of women continuing to be much higher than for men, it's likely to stay that way for a long time.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher).  Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held.  Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here.  It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red.  It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more