Census Information Center

Transcription

good morning and welcome to the us census bureau I am Keva Seth Silversmith public affairs specialist here at the bureau thank you for joining us for our discussion today about educational attainment if you'd like to participate in our chat please do so at facebook.com/uscensusbureau you can also ask your questions via twitter with the hashtag #census I'm joined today by Kurt Bowman the chief education and social stratification branch at the US census bureau and we'll be answering your questions for the duration of this chat I'd like to start by having you tell me a little bit more about this survey how long have you been doing it now this is the the survey this is based on this information is based on is the current population survey it's a survey that started with concerns about unemployment in the great depression and we've been collecting these data since nineteen forty it's the major survey that we use to collect information on employment and unemployment and uh... it's a joint project between the US census bureau and the bureau of labor statistics um we have data that we've been following on education and various other topics since nineteen forty seven that we have that uh... are recorded uh... from the survey so it's a it's a well-established survey that allows us to tell a lot about trends great now who uses these data and what is the importance of it well educational attainment as in most surveys in the current population survey and others that people look at how other characteristics vary with educational attainment it's a important variable in looking at how things change for example with poverty wanna see how poverty changes at different levels of educational attainment you want to see how incomes change and and uh... employment changes and so forth and that'll be done in the current population survey in addition the department of education does use the products from this survey in their reports on education in the country that's great now in order to give us some background maybe you could talk about the difference between educational attainment and school enrollment yeah this is something that the people can get confused about now school enrollment I think everybody understands that's when you actually go to school kids go to school educational attainment is the amount of schooling that you've finished when you've completed your schooling the point of confusion comes in when we talk about say high school graduates so that when some people well a common thing to think about when you say high school graduates is people who just graduated from high school uh... what we are talking about here is educational attainment we're looking at something slightly different we're looking at the entire adult population people who finish their schooling and how many people out there in the population at one time or another ever completed high school so that's the that's the focus we have here we're looking at educational attainment that we're looking at the adult population aged twenty five and older what are the major trends that you've seen since you started doing a survey well it's really an interesting story uh... I think everybody realizes or a lot of people have seen if you think about your parents and grandparents if they're from this country that with each generation there seems to be a little bit more education of course it's not true for every family in every generation but overall it's uh... you know the the transition from one generations to the next getting a little more education it's really been reflected strongly in the statistics that we observe across uh... time from nineteen forty two now in nineteen forty twenty four percent of the population had a high school diploma twenty four percent right now it's eighty six percent in 2010 uh... similarly for college degrees less than five percent of the population until nineteen forty had a college degree whereas now twenty-seven percent of the adult population that's twenty-five and over have completed college or are higher education I'm here with Kurt Bowman the chief of education and the social stratification branch at the US census bureau and as a reminder you can ask your questions at facebook.com/uscensusbureau and also the uh... twitter using the hash tag #census so Kurt tell me what are key findings of this survey okay well when we look at the these data we were interested in some of the trends that have been with women in education a few years ago in two thousand two for the first time the adult population of women were more likely to have completed high school then the adult population twenty-five and older population of men by and uh... that was something that happened in two thousand two and women have been making great strides in education and they have not yet quite caught up in terms of completing high school they've come quite close um... in this most recent survey twenty ten which is what i'm reporting about now uh... we had thirty thirty point three percent of the uh... men had a bachelor's degree or higher and twenty nine point six percent of the women had a bachelor's degree or higher so it's very very close is actually statistically different there's some catching up on the other hand if you look at the employed population people who are at a job you have people uh... among women there's thirty seven percent with a bachelor's degree or higher thirty five percent for men so among employed population men are less likely than women to have a bachelor's degree or higher so this is something that's showing the continuing advance of of women in terms of education how does this relate and translate to even younger people well that's that's a good question um... for younger people the tend to reflect what's happening over time, for older people they got their educate tend to have gotten their education long time ago whereas for younger people they've gotten their education more recently um... for example in a recent report we found that the people aged over sixty five only seventy four percent high school diploma versus the total population with eighty four percent having high school diploma so there's a real difference in the older population the younger population uh... for women um... there's a real advantage even at the at that bachelor's degree uh... thirty six percent of women twenty five to twenty nine had a bachelor's degree or higher and uh... twenty eight percent of men twenty five two twenty nine had a bachelor's degree or higher now you were the author of a blog post on at the uh... census agency blog random samplings which we found at census.gov and you reported how many people finish degrees they had started can you tell me more about that this is some additional information we hadn't analyzed before it's been out there on the data but we decided to look a little bit more closely at whether people actually finished at the level where they had a degree when they left or a diploma when they left school or whether they continued on on further we have some extra basically when we...in the current population survey we asked people about their highest degree and their highest level of education but we also have some follow-up questions asked did you go further on and just not complete that that higher level so we got that information and took a look at it and if you look at it while sixty four percent of people did complete the education uh... a level of education that is they got the high school they got a diploma or and they finished with that, they finished college or finished an associates degree um... there's thirty six percent of the population though went to some level of education and didn't actually finish a degree or diploma with that um... the most common uh... in that is that people who went to... had some college but did not finish a degree that's uh... seventeen percent of the population had some college but no degree um... another large chunk is people who never finished high school uh... some of them never actually even went to school at all there's one percent of the population that never even started school which is uh... kind of strange thing in this day and age and it's reflected in our statistics uh... thirteen percent overall did not complete high school and uh... another two percent got a GED you can argue either way whether that's considered a degree or diploma or whether that's considered not a degree ro diploma there's a debate uh... among scholars at this point but uh... we're not trying to take a stance there we're just reporting the numbers and did this survey to tell you why people stopped no we don't have information on why people stopped and what they you know what they were trying to do, what their intentions were but there are a lot of people they do it for lots of different reasons they some people uh... are just trying out a certain level of education and may just decide that's really not for them incomes they try some college uh... some people might have academic difficulties some people might have financial difficulties to keep them from going on uh... there's lots of different things that may come up in your life that pulls you out of school there is work there done by the department of education surveys uh... that that covers some of this stuff but this isn't something we cover i'm joined today by Kurt Bowman who's the chief education and social stratification branch at the US census bureau and as a reminder you can participate in our chat today via facebook uh... at /uscensusbureau or on twitter with the hash tag #census so Kurt tell me about how this survey information is collected the current population survey is really that's a very large survey uh... compared to say but you might be used to in terms of a poll uh... you know the public opinion poll or something like that but usually has a few thousand cases we have uh... about the these estimates are based on survey information from about seventy seven thousand households around the country um... that's not like the census which is you know everybody use you should know the number i don't have to three hundred and twelve million is it? um... that uh... that's people not households but than any case uh... this the um... what we do is we go out and interview people in person if we can uh... we often have follow-ups and additional interviews are done uh... my telephone so it's not unlike the census it's not a mail out and mail back sort of operation its something where we interview people and it's done every month uh... throughout the year this is based on data that we collected early spring What other releases do you have coming up ok well we have a lot of releases coming up actually um... lot of very interesting stuff one other just to mention we have a major a survey that we run which is called the american community survey and that actually samples from three million households per year um... our real major effort uh... on our part and it gives us much more reliable information about specific geographies in terms of educational attainment we have been we have combined information from the CPS and from the ACS we've turned that into a report on educational attainment that we're going to be producing and coming up with an in uh... hopefully this summer we also have uh... a report that's coming out on school enrollment which is people who are currently enrolled in school and uh... also will be using both sources of data both the current population survey and the american community survey um... we'll we also have in the american community survey we have a question on what field what major field of study people completed in high school and we have a a report that we're we're going to come out with on that as well and that's not all believe it or not we have a couple more we have one that looks at earnings by education um... and we have another one that's that looks at uh... specific uh... degrees below the bachelor's degrees in some of the earnings and the occupations become out of out of studying getting a vocational degree uh... career technical education as well as the traditional bachelors and associates degrees we have a question that's coming from twitter is Bethesda still the best educated town in america i believe it was for the census in two thousand i don't know exactly what's going to come out of the the first of all of let me get one thing straight we're not gonna find that out from the census because that survey i just mentioned the american community survey has taken over a lot of the role that uh... uh... was played in the census by what we called the long form in two thousand we sent out two types of forms one was short form which had uh... basically six to ten items of information that we collect from people age race sex and afew things about the house housing whether you're owner or renter we're still doing that into two thousand ten in two thousand ten we're not using the long form which asks about income the plumbing in your house your education and all these other questions that we better on important for agency information and a lot of other purposes that has been transferred to this large survey that I've been talking about the american community survey that's it the one where we sample three million people a year given that we're going to have to we do have information from the american community survey that does reflect on the uh... education levels in in individual towns and cities i don't know that we have done our ranking of the city's in terms of education we do have to do that would be able to look at that we're going to be producing more in the coming year um... i guess that's a long winded and very wordy way of saying i don't really know but but we should have the answer we could have the answer for you from using the american community survey data from facebook we have uh... a couple questions the first one is are you discovering sections of the country where the level of education attainment is declining perhaps due to immigration uh... no we haven't really looked at that issue i'd think we've we're going to to be looking at that uh... a little bit more closely in the report that we have the data we have here usually offer information on uh... individual states in the regions but the american community survey is much more better suited for that we do our analysis at the uh... american community survey the report I was talking about we'll probably get address that one thing i can say is we did look at the we have looked at the education levels of immigrants and it's and there's a funny um... pattern to that on the one hand we have many immigrants who haven't completed a high school diploma they're much more likely not to have completed high school and that's probably the common issue common image that people have on the other hand there's a lot of people with advanced degrees among the immigrant population and in fact among the non-native population you're more likely to have advanced degrees than the native population so it's uh... it's kind of a mixed bag in terms education another question from facebook do recessions like the one just experienced cause levels of accomplishment in education to change and if so in what direction we've been trying to look at that it's kind of hard to say uh... what's been happening uh... it's not an overwhelming trend that's jumped out in the data once again that would really more affect people's enrollment than their educational attainment so people might be, maybe have gone back to school because of the recession or left school because of the recession you can see there's two different ways that can happen if you can't find a job you may um... go back to school for other people if the family's short on money you may have to leave school and get and and get a job there's two polls there we don't know what the net effect is but we are we are looking at that in our school enrollment report were coming up on the end of our time so one last question where can people go to get more information in general about these studies yeah if you want to find more uh... about this just go to our main web page which is www.census.gov and uh... when you get there there's a place where you can click on subjects a to z click on that and go to E for education and then click on educational attainment and you'll come right to the page that that describes these data and all the reports that we do on attainment Kurt thanks very much for your time today and I'd like to remind everyone to continue following us on facebook and twitter for information on our next UStream event and for other news that updates from the US census bureau