The Geographical Divide in Educational Attainment
Chad Aldeman highlights this rather striking pattern that emerges when you code US states according to whether the proportion of their adult population with a high school degree is above-average or below-average:
It’s hard to see, but Rhode Island actually belongs in the “South and New York” bloc rather than the “North and Florida” block. This is essentially a coincidence, since the low-scoring states of the southwest aren’t part of “the south” in culture, political, or institutional terms. It just happens to be the case that both Dixieness and being close to Mexico lead to poor performance on this score. Not totally sure what the deal with New York is, but my favorite high school dropout is my dad, and that’s where he lives so I like to think he’s the one putting the Empire State over the top.
42 Responses to “The Geographical Divide in Educational Attainment”
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March 7th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
…er, don’t you mean “under the top”?
As for NY State, probably low high school completion numbers in NYC make the state overall below average.
March 7th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
So I went and looked at the report the graph comes from.
National Average: 84.5
New York Average: 84.1
That is within margin of error. What this does is highlight just how useless yes-or-no maps like this are. A heat map would be useful. But not this map.
March 7th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
being close to Mexico lead[s] to poor performance
Cue predictable crap from LoneWackoff …
March 7th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
If OK is average, we’re all doomed.
March 7th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
In NY and California, I’d bet that immigration accounts for some of the numbers.
March 7th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Cue predictable crap from LoneWackoff …
Preceded by your predictable dumbass prediction.
March 7th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
hey@3, you forgot to mention Steve Sailer and Fred.
March 7th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Low-skilled immigrants in the City. Jersey and Virginia are immigrant magnets too, but more of them are high-skilled.
March 7th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Wow… Check out page 8 of http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p20-560.pdf (which is where this is drawn from, apparently).
They have a breakdown of native-born versus foreign born by state, and they also have bachelor’s degree statistics. New York and California do indeed have massive gulfs between the two groups.
Meanwhile, every time I see information like this, I keep wondering why any politician from the south is allowed to open their yaps about domestic policy or the proper role of government in infrastructure – it’s like alchemists from the 13th century decrying any kind of reliance on science because they’re pretty sure it’s not reliable from their own personal experiences.
March 7th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
I felt this divide in education was important last fall when the pro-union people were campaigning against the “Right To Work” initiative here in Colorado. They were bringing up scary statistics about how states with Right to Work legislation were poorer and such. If they bothered to control for something quite important as a predictor of wealth (education) they would have found that the Right To Work has no statistical impact. I’m not anti-union, but I’d like the unions to at least try to make a statistically sound argument if they are going to get the right to force people to pay dues as a condition of employment.
March 7th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
If you look at the data there might be a demographic reason for this. Hispanics are well below the average HS graduation rate (around 60%) while whites (non-Hispanic), blacks and asians are all in the 80’s.
That doesn’t seem to explain places like Georgia but it probably might explain New York, California and other southwestern states that have large hispanic populations.
March 7th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
The same pattern applies to educational performance. Senator Moynihan once quipped that the best predictor of educational success is proximity to the Canadian border, which led others to suggest that if California wanted to do better it should annex Washington and Oregon.
March 7th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
There is substantial overlap between this map and the Clinton-Obama map from the primaries. Obama took six Deep South states with big black populations, Clinton took six Ohio Valley and Northeastern states, but otherwise the only outliers are South Dakota and Florida (which didn’t really have a primary).
March 7th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Mild climates are survivable even if you are dumb. Think about it, the fewer ice storms means less preparation. I think we will see a similar pattern in Europe.
March 7th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Whoops… the map.
March 7th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
That is within margin of error. What this does is highlight just how useless yes-or-no maps like this are. A heat map would be useful. But not this map.
March 7th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
As George Will coyly hinted in his obituary for Daniel Patrick Moynihan:
“The Senate’s Sisyphus, Moynihan was forever pushing uphill a boulder of inconvenient data. A social scientist trained to distinguish correlation from causation, and a wit, Moynihan puckishly said that a crucial determinant of the quality of American schools is proximity to the Canadian border. The barb in his jest was this: High cognitive outputs correlate not with high per-pupil expenditures but with a high percentage of two-parent families. For that, there was the rough geographical correlation that caused Moynihan to suggest that states trying to improve their students’ test scores should move closer to Canada.”
Obviously, hockey makes you smart. That’s the only possible conclusion.
March 7th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
The big change over time is in California, the most important and most trend-setting state:
According to a Census Bureau Supplementary Survey of 700,000 households across the country, California boasts 2 million recipients of graduate degrees (master’s or Ph.D. or professional diplomas such as M.D. or J.D.).
Yet this sophisticated state also is home to 2.2 million adults who never even attended high school. Their ranks were up 7 percent during the 1990s. By contrast, in the rest of America, the number of adults who had never seen the inside of a high school dropped by 30 percent over that decade.
The Golden State is now one of only three states with above average percentages both of people who never got past elementary school and of holders of graduate degrees. (The other two are New Mexico and Rhode Island.) In California, 10.7 percent of grownups have no more than elementary schooling, compared to only 6.4 percent in the other 49 states.
Of all the states in the Union, California now has the lowest percentage of its population with a midlevel education consisting of at least a high school diploma or some college, but not a bachelor’s degree from a four-year college.
That’s the future: more inequality.
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/041121_ca.htm
March 7th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
The pattern on the chart seems to largely reflect the percentage of the population which is black or Hispanic. I put together some heat maps by ethnicity and state, for the 25 largest states only, based on census bureau data. The spreadsheet and heat maps should be viewable here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pmRbCP296ECkgj3lT3JjAEA
March 7th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
So maybe the South is hell on earth for the working man. A place where he can’t get ahead.
Or maybe hundreds of thousands of working men in places like Detroit and Pittsburgh actually moved south in the 1970s-1990s to find work.
That is, one reason the south has a high proportion of people without college degrees is not necessarily that the north educated its workers to a higher degree.
The workers left. because the north really sucked for workers. What with the lack of work, and all.
March 7th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
“he low-scoring states of the southwest aren’t part of ‘the south’ in culture, political, or institutional terms.”
You’d be surprised. Texas starts at the LA county border.
March 7th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
for New York, its a combination of the vast swaths of rural communities across the north, and southern middle-west parts of the state, combined with the horrible treatment that the inner-city poor receive in NYCs school system. huge numbers of people in NYC from low-income families drop out of school.
March 7th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
“Obviously, hockey makes you smart.”
Well, it could be lacrosse as well. Although when you think about it, neither sport seems conducive to intelligence. But both sports would give you a good insight into emergency dental procedures. But then again, I think of my college, Cornell. The only sports we were good at were hockey and lacrosse. And Cornell is considered to be a fairly intellectual school. And we produced Joe Nieuwendyk. He was our star player when I was there.
March 7th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
High school, Sam, high school graduates. I guess you’re not one.
March 7th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
There are lots of recent immigrants in Rhode Island, from Southeast Asia, West Africa, the Carribean and Central America (and more!).
March 7th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
As someone who escaped from Rhode Island as soon as legally possible, I am absolutely not surprised at that part of the map.
Matt, look at the joblessness numbers, too. Rhode Island is a disaster on that score, too.
I guess a whole lot of businesses look at RI and say, “Why would I hire these idiots?”
And, BTW, it was just as stupid a place in the 80’s, before brown people showed up.
March 7th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
–Native-born versus immigrant makes a big difference, but so does age: there is a very significant drop off in educational attainment when you move above 65.
Florida would be an exception, but that is likely due to the fact that the seniors in Florida are probably wealthier than average, and that would correlate with being better educated on average.
March 7th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Isn’t it crazy to include your dad in this kind of question. We are really cocerned with new dropouts right? So we want to know say what percent of people under 30 drop out. Maybe we also want to no about who goes back to school and thats a different map. I don’t think this explains New York but an outside possibility is that older people are more likely to have dropped out of high school, but rich older people who didn’t drop out left New York and retired in Florida leaving New York with higher numbers. I kind of doubt it, but it would be consistant with the your dad thesis.
March 7th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
So, explain to me again why letting in vast numbers of illegal immigrants is such a great idea?
March 7th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Anyway, if you want to get Matt’s readers really interested, put up a state map of education among whites.
The fact that this map is obviously dominated by a state’s percentage of Hispanics and blacks is just boring and depressing, but it’s fun to talk about state vs. state differences among whites.
March 7th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Here’s Average Years of Schooling for NonHispanic Whites from the 2000 Census:
1 District of Columbia 16.2
2 Hawaii 14.2
3 Colorado 14.0
4 New Mexico 13.9
5 California 13.9
6 Alaska 13.8
7 Utah 13.7
8 Maryland 13.7
9 Washington 13.6
10 Arizona 13.6
11 Massachusetts 13.6
12 Connecticut 13.6
13 Texas 13.5
14 New York 13.5
15 Minnesota 13.5
16 New Jersey 13.4
17 Oregon 13.4
18 New Hampshire 13.4
19 Virginia 13.4
20 Kansas 13.4
21 Illinois 13.4
22 Vermont 13.4
23 Wyoming 13.3
24 Montana 13.3
25 Nebraska 13.3
26 Idaho 13.3
27 Delaware 13.3
28 Nevada 13.3
29 Florida 13.3
30 Georgia 13.1
31 Wisconsin 13.1
32 Michigan 13.1
33 Iowa 13.0
34 Maine 13.0
35 South Dakota 13.0
36 North Carolina 13.0
37 Rhode Island 13.0
38 North Dakota 13.0
39 Ohio 13.0
40 South Carolina 13.0
41 Oklahoma 13.0
42 Pennsylvania 12.9
43 Missouri 12.9
44 Indiana 12.9
45 Mississippi 12.7
46 Louisiana 12.7
47 Alabama 12.7
48 Tennessee 12.5
49 Arkansas 12.5
50 Kentucky 12.2
51 West Virginia 12.2
A couple of points to keep in mind is that average age in a state effects its ranking, since the number of years of schooling completed has been going up over time. Thus, a young state like Utah or D.C. will look better in this than an old state like North Dakota, even though North Dakota’s students do quite well on the NAEP.
March 7th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
“Texas starts at the LA county border.”
So, so true.
March 7th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
(That’s right Linus. Your inbred, “small potatoes aristocrat” friends in Rhode Island belong to the underperformers.)
Why don’t you people leave me alone? I’m playing asteroids on the panda3d.
(No one is bothering you Linus. You bother the other ones.)
Did I tell you about the cat? He lets me pet him now. Maybe I’ll take a picture.
March 7th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
It’s a good thing Bill Gates at least waited until he got to Harvard before dropping out, otherwise Washington state might have come in below average.
March 8th, 2009 at 8:59 am
>but my favorite high school dropout is my dad
C’mon, Matt. Tell your father to buck up and get his GED.
He can let writing his next novel slide for a while.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:54 am
According to Gov. Paterson, 70% of New York’s education budget goes for administration, 30% for classroom. I’m in favor of government jobs in general, but not where people are “staring out the window” for $180,000 per annum (as one non-education New York State bureaucrat admitted). I am forced to wonder how much of that 70% is well spent.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Put a map of two parent households next to this product and see if there is a correlation.
March 8th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
I wish they would make those charts in a format that translated into Excel, it would make it a lot easier to analyze the information.
I agree that a shaded chart with more gradations would be much more valuable than just the above/below average format.
Another interesting thing is that all the states with an above-average number of people with university degrees voted for Obama – except for Utah and Kansas.
March 9th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
a more interesting question is are Cornell alum like fostert douches before arriving at Cornell or does four years in that frozen backwater surrounded by cut throat strivers, date rapists, zoophiles, princesses and Ag school townies bring out the worst in people
plus their hockey players are all Canadians
March 10th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Judging from some of the comments it’s obvious that many have bought into the hype that education is a substitute for intelligence and common sense. There are too many factors involved. To simply jump to the sophmoric conclusion that “southerners is be stupid” is nothing more than an excercise in tiresome poppish smug.
Having watched the way many “educated” people behave….allowing themselves to be manipulated so easily to hate and loate this person…to worship and weep at the site of that person…I’d say the amount of one’s education has more to do with their ability to buy a piece of paper that they’ve been told makes them smarter than everyone else.
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