Educational Attainment Statistics Reveal Regional Differences
Which city has a higher percentage of residents with a college education: Boulder or Boston? If you guessed Boston - a city strongly associated with some of the country’s most prestigious higher education institutions - well, you’d be wrong.
On a regional basis, the largest percentage of the adult population with a bachelor’s degree or higher live in the Northeast, according to Educational Attainment in the United States: 2007, recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Information in the report was based on two data sources: American Community Survey (ACS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS).
The District of Columbia carried the highest concentration of college graduates, with 47 percent of its adult residents having earned a bachelor’s degree or higher. In addition to D.C., more than one in three adults had at least a bachelor’s degree in Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
On the flip side, the smallest percentage of the population with a college education was in the South, according to the survey. Less than one in five adults had a bachelor’s degree or more education in Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia.
Higher educational attainment is associated with higher earnings on average .... Median earnings for a worker with a bachelor’s degree were 74 percent higher than median earnings for a worker with a high school diploma alone, and median earnings for an advanced degree were 31 percent higher than earnings for a bachelor’s degree, according to the Census Bureau.
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