US Education (1970 – 2015) – Interactive

produced using: R (packages: ggplot2, plotly)

Description

This project uses education data for US states and counties for each decade between 1970 to 2010 and for 2015. The goal is to explore how education levels for adults has changed over time on both a national and state level.

NOTE: These graphs are made interactive using plotly. Feel free to click on any graph to take you to the plotly site where you can customize how you view them.

National

As seen below, the majority of adults in the US during the 1970s had received less than a high school education, while only around 10 percent of adults during that time had finished college. However, it appears that the percentage of adults who had some college or finished college increased through time while the percentage of people who did not complete high school decreased to less than 15 percent.

Overall, education levels seem to have increased by a notable amount over the 40 year period.

State

This graph shows the percentage of adults at each state’s educational level throughout the decades. Unsurprisingly, the patterns are similar to those from the national level. By going to the plotly site, one can see which dot represents each state from hovering over the graph.

This graph shows the change in educational levels through time for 6 states. I chose these states because I wanted to compare the 3 states that had the highest percentage of adults with less than a high school education (KY, NC, SC), with the 3 states that had the lowest percentage of adults for that category (AK, NV, UT).

By 2015, all of the states were able to get the percentage of people with less than a high school education to lower than 20 percent. From a first glance it seemed that the 3 states that had the lowest percentage of adults who did not finish HS had higher percentages of adults who completed college by 2015. However, from a closer examination it looks like SC has more college grads than NV. In general, while there were staggering differences in education levels between states in the 1970s, the differences have become more evened out through time. Additionally, there does not appear to be a strong advantage for having higher education levels in 70s since most states were able to catch up by 2015.