Education Levels in the US, by State and Attainment

Attainment has always been an interesting topic for me, every since I first got stunned into disbelief when I looked at the data over time. Even looking at shorter periods can lead to some revelations that many don't make sense at first.

Here is the latest data from NCES, published in the Digest of Education Statistics. Please note that this is for informational purposes only, and I've not even attempted to visualize the standard errors in this data, which vary from state-to-state.

There are four views year, all looking at educational attainment by state in 2012 and 2022.

The first shows data on a map: Choose the year, and choose the level of attainment. Note that the top three categories can be confusing: BA means a Bachelor's degree only; Grad degree means at least a Master's (or higher, of course); and BA or more presumably combines those two. Again, standard errors might mean the numbers don't always add up perfectly.

The second shows the data on a bar chart, in three views: 2012 data, 2022 data, and the change, in percentage points. You can choose the attainment level, and then use the control to decide which column to sort the data by.

The third view is a slope chart, where you can see the two years for any state. Choose the attainment level, and then highlight the state you're interested in. Hover over the points for details.

And finally, the scatter shows the same data, with the same controls; the bubbles are sized by percentage-point change. Additionally, you can use the filter to see which states have changed the most or the least.

If anything surprises you here, drop a comment below, or send me an email.

Comments

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...

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...

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog