Chapter 8: State Indicators

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Chapter 8:


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State Indicators

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Workforce

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Quartiles | Findings | Description

Bachelor's degree-holders as share of workforce: 2000

Quartiles

Quartile groups for bachelor's degree holders as share of workforce: 2002*

1st Quartile	2nd Quartile	3rd Quartile	4th Quartile
(59.7% - 37.9%)	(37.9% - 33.2%)	(33.0% - 30.4%)	(30.3% - 24.3%)

Colorado	Arizona	Alabama	Arkansas
Connecticut	California	Alaska	Idaho
District of Columbia	Delaware	Georgia	Iowa
Hawaii	Florida	Indiana	Mississippi
Maryland	Illinois	Kentucky	Nevada
Massachusetts	Kansas	Louisiana	North Carolina
New Hampshire	Maine	Michigan	Oklahoma
New Jersey	Minnesota	Montana	South Dakota
New York	Missouri	Nebraska	Tennessee
Rhode Island	New Mexico	North Dakota	Utah
Vermont	Ohio	South Carolina	West Virginia
Virginia	Oregon	Texas	Wyoming
Washington	Pennsylvania	Wisconsin

States in alphabetical order, not data order. SOURCES: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Division, Education and Stratification Branch, Educational Attainment in the United States*; and U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics. See table 8-8.

Findings

In 2002, there were 48.7 million bachelor's degree holders in the United States, up from 35.6 million in 1993.
The nationwide value of this indicator rose from 29.6 percent in 1993 to 35.6 percent in 2002, indicating a significant increase in the number and percentage of workers who completed a baccalaureate.
The proportion of the workforce with a bachelor's degree increased considerably in many states, possibly reflecting the states' attraction of younger cohorts of workers with relatively more college-educated people than older cohorts or a restructuring of their economies.
The geographic distribution of bachelor's degree holders in the workforce bears little resemblance to any of the degree-based indicators, attesting to the considerable mobility of the U.S. college-educated population.

Description

Bachelor's degrees are considered an indicator of a well-educated workforce because of the clear advantage they provide over less educational attainment in terms of expected lifetime earnings. The indicator is expressed as the percentage of workers in a state's workforce who hold at least a bachelor's degree. A high value for this indicator denotes that the state has a large percentage of workers who completed an undergraduate education.

Degree data, based on the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS), are limited to individuals who are age 25 or older. Civilian workforce data are Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates based on CPS. Estimates for sparsely populated states and the District of Columbia may be imprecise because of their small representation in the survey samples.