Hmm- Interesting- High School graduates map

[packman]

[Fiendish Thingy]

1. "I love the uneducated" - TFG. Nt

[Warpy]

23. Most of my own education was obtained in spite of high school

and certainly not because of it, with the exception of the STEM classes I was in.

Low graduation rates here in NM reflect the number of jobs available to kids without high school diplomas. The same thing was true in NC when I was a kid, the mills would hire kids at 16 and the pay was slightly better than entry level office work that high school grads were shunted into. Here in NM, it's working with large animals and working in oil and gas fields.

In high school in NC, I had a Swedish friend whose dad was here temporarily, I want to say with Volvo, but I don't remember. She was allowed to leave school at 16 since that's what she'd do in Sweden. Damn, I was so jealous, especially when I realized there would be no penalty attached to leaving school at 16 in most of Europe, where they recognize not all kids are university material.

Then we have a class of men in this country, TFG the most conspicuous example, with fancy educations at fancy universities and who haven't seen the inside of a book since they left school. Those are the truly uneducated.

[OMGWTF]

32. "Donald Trump was the dumbest GD student I ever had."

-- William T. Kelly, former professor, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton

[Meadowoak]

2. Looks like most of Trump country has a 4th grade education.

[sarcasmo]

9. Easy pickings for a cult leader.

[yonder]

3. K&R. pretty much what one would expect.

[Efilroft Sul]

4. Interesting that Wyoming, arguably the most solidly Republican state, is solidly blue.

[Brother Buzz]

8. A little birdie told me Wyoming graduated a lot of cattle to bump those numbers up

[tblue37]

10. Utah and Wyoming are Mormon strongholds. Mormons do encourage their kids

to take school seriously.

[Efilroft Sul]

11. I'm actually glad to learn about this information.

I don't agree with Mormon politics or religion, but I do agree with them about the importance of education.

[ret5hd]

55. All 25 students graduated.

[Efilroft Sul]

56. My computer screen is glad that I didn't have coffee yet!

Would've spit it all over the damn monitor.

[brush]

5. That whole yellow/tan expanse from Virginia aouth to Georgia...

and west to Texas is surprising.

[empedocles]

6. 'What North-South divide?'

[Worse than I thought. Scary].

[Emile]

12. Republican states not doing well at all. Speaks volumes on their governing abilities.

[ultralite001]

13. Let's overlay this map...

with one showing internet access...

That is all...

[thucythucy]

14. I'm surprised at California.

It used to be among the best in the nation.

Can anyone explain all the yellow and brown in south and central California?

[Codifer]

16. I would think

that this distribution is the result of agricultural workers and the chronic poor education facilities. Most kids are needed in the fields as soon as can be accomplished. his fits the Central Valley and Imperial valley in the far south.

Perhaps this same pattern could be seen in Arizona or other agricultural states.

[chowder66]

17. There is a legend at the bottom right of the map that shows the percentages in yellow and brown.

[thucythucy]

19. I get that.

What I was asking was why that part of California ranks so low in high school graduates.

The explanation seems to be that the more agricultural parts of the state do worse for various reasons.

It still surprises me though.

[deurbano]

24. Kevin McCarthy's Bakersfield vs. Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco

[Fiendish Thingy]

27. Migrant workers kids

The older teens often miss lots of school to help in the fields, and the families often return to Mexico for extended periods at the holidays. In addition, most of them face difficulties because English is not their native language.

My daughter teaches in Salinas, and their calendars are adjusted to accommodate for these factors, and they have separate classes (at least for English) for those designated as ELL.

Her school has the highest grad rates in the district, above the mostly white “rich kids” high school.

[ZonkerHarris]

31. large parts of rural CA are quite Republican. That explains it.

[SunSeeker]

34. CA's Proposition 13, passed in 1978 to limit property taxes, starved our schools.

Property taxes are a key funder of US schools, and why US schools are so unequal. If you go to a school in a low property value neighborhood, that school is falling apart and has insufficient staff and supplies. Prop. 13 exacerbated that. Rich neighborhoods still have good schools in CA, but everyone else is fucked.

[Samrob]

15. Smaller populations yield larger percentage.

You can have twenty times the actual number of high school graduates than a neighboring state with a small population and their percentage will be higher with less graduates.

[burrowowl]

28. Yup! for example

Los Alamos, NM: low population, lots of PHDs; Van Horne area Texas, lots of engineers in oil and 'waste' disposal companies; El Paso, TX votes largely Democratic ...etc; I think map is accurate, but needs analysis.

[GoCubsGo]

54. Yes, which is also why when you look closer,

you'll notice that the pockets of yellow in the predominately "blue" states are the counties which hold cities, like Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, multiple boroughs of NYC... Probably Boston and various cities in NJ, CT, and DE, as well. It's hard to tell from that map.

[erronis]

18. Not sure where you got this chart. Nice to include a link!

As Far As I Can Tell, it probably originated at https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/

The closest map I can find is one that shows a somewhat different pattern, altho not unexpected:
https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/data-explorer?id=215

[NullTuples]

20. I question the accuracy of this map!

Del Norte county - that tiny yellow blip in the north-west-most corner of California marked as 75%-85% graduation rate - has one high school.

That school's graduation rate is 93%, close to the state median. This is despite rather dismal proficiency scores otherwise (but that is a much larger and very different topic. The point is that out of around a thousand students, approximately nine hundred and thirty did good enough to graduate).

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/california/districts/del-norte-county-unified-school-district/del-norte-high-school-2051

However, one of the major employers in the county is Pelican Bay supermax prison.

I wonder if the map maker simply queried "percent of county that graduated high school" which is not actually the same as percent attaining at least a high school graduate education or equivalent from the county's high school(s), as the prisoners very likely 100% brought in from elsewhere as adults.

If so, this would be indicative of the same statistical slight of hand where rural counties are granted political power or funding based on total population at a given moment, yet a large part of that population is unable to vote, etc. because they are incarcerated. And especially in states where prisons are largely privatized such as Montana, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arizona, etc.

[ancianita]

37. It's over ten years old, so sure, the counties look different now.

No slight of hand. Just the counts for 2011.

[waterwatcher123]

21. This Thematic Map is Not Necessarily an Accurate Picture.

If you look at the legend, the breaks are so close together that areas in light yellow and brown may obscure some dramatic differences that would be visible if the legend was broken up by quartiles (for instance, is there any real difference between 85.2 or .3 and 85.4). I would guess that this is the Natural Breaks algorithm in ArcGIS that is based on the preponderance of where the data falls.

It would be nice to see a map of the population with any level of post-secondary education. It is actually astounding how small the population is of adults with a technical certification or bachelor's degree in the United States. We need to expand access to higher education and trade schools to everyone. I am not sure how you keep a vibrant economy and democracy without more focus on life-long learning and education.

[Snackshack]

22. The 1st...

…10 minutes of Idiocracy perfectly illustrated right there.

DT has let it slip a time or two that he loves the uneducated voter. If not for them he would be nothing more than an out of shape bloviating one man criminal enterprise instead of the out of shape bloviating one man criminal enterprise with access to Americas most sensitive and secret information. Remember DT by dent of being elected President automatically gets top secret clearance, DT would have never passed a security background check. Kushner as well as Ivanka did not pass either but DT “waived” that pre-requisite for them in order to have access and view our most secret an sensitive issues.

This will go down in history as the worst compromise of our IC ever. Perpetrated by a man who also…screwed the pooch so badly with his incompetence or criminal negligence that over a million Americans died from COVID. Then as a parting gift he threw our Democracy into a tailspin and attempted to overthrow it.

The man really was a one man criminal enterprise. I don’t think a day in his term went by where he did not break a law. Hatch Act violations, Emoluments, Obstruction, Abuse of Power the list goes on and on.

The GOP knew DT was unfit and unqualified all of them vivisected him as a candidate but that changed quickly after the election.

[lonely bird]

26. To me it isn't about education

It is about critical thinking. It is about not laboring under mythology.

[WarGamer]

29. Damn look at Wyoming.

The only state I can see that doesn't have a beige or tan County.

EDIT: Hawaii also.

EDIT: Montana and Wyoming have the highest high school graduation rates in the USA.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

30. First order approximation: Get close to Canada :) . . . nt

[Martin68]

33. Yup. That map is worth a thousand words.

[IronLionZion]

35. Lots of educated people in the mountain west

[ancianita]

40. For getting a high school diploma?

Even if the population had 100% high school diplomas, that doesn't mean anything but that 100% have introductory educations. More important to our interests, I'd think, is what percent of the h.s. grads went on to graduate from four year colleges and beyond.

This is from 2015, still using the 2010 census data, in reference to the time posted by the OP. There's more recent data than this.






There is still the significant difference between being degreed and being educated.

No matter how high the degree is, it's still no guarantee of anything but exposure to education.
We can only assume that the higher the degree, the more education has been attained.

Many of us can give examples of people we know with PhD's who are the stupidest, most unwise and immoral people. I myself, with an MA from Northwestern U. am friends with just as many high school diploma earners who are the most inquisitive, intellectual, judicious and moral people.

What we generally see is that 30% of the US have diplomas at college or above. The 70% who don't consists of 15% who don't even get a h.s. diploma. So with 55% actually walking around with only high school introductory educations, and no guarantee that they are grade level readers, we're talking a 70% population (and this is optimist) average at around grade 10 in introductory education attainment?

[IronLionZion]

41. There is a backlash to college degrees in many red states

They love the poorly educated so they oppose things like student loan forgiveness or student financial aid.

[ancianita]

43. Sure. It's also a continuation of the anti-intellectual grooming done by Davos Man

richies since the 70's.

The greatest deterrent to the attainment of college degrees started with the exclusionary policies of colleges and universities themselves, that have inflated their prices beyond the reach of workers whose wages haven't proportionally increased from the 70's as well.

The educational attainment class war feature was started by the upper 1% decades ago, and that class is now seeing the existence of the undereducated population they wanted.

Resistance to that, however, comes from educated professional unions of teachers, lawyers and other professions. And Biden's administration, with college debt forgiveness projects.

Which is why we Democrats are fighting against the degreed tools of Davos Man, corporate Republicans and media owners, who want populations believing their Austrian austerity trickle down economics messaging. Davos Man also wants bullshit culture wars so they can continue to profit.

Truly educated people are not fighting the undereducated. But the 1% try to make them believe that.

Biden leads in messageing that whoever wants college should have affordable access to it, since democracy's existence depends on an educated populace to engage with it. That's our winning party message, because everyone wants access to better education in any form.

[waterwatcher123]

42. The Map Seems to Suggest the Measurement is Graduate or Professional Degrees by County.

The term professional degree is pretty broad in that it can be anything from a bachelors to a PhD. So, is this a map of those programs that prepare people for a specific profession (lawyers, for instance) and people with graduate degrees? I wonder if this is what they intended by this map, or if the title is not quite right. If it is just these two groups, it leaves out a lot of people with more general degrees in the arts and sciences.

One pretty interesting data point that never seems to get measured is the number of people who have some level of post secondary education (attended and never finished). These would be the people who have the burden of paying for an education without any of the employment benefits (people who would really benefit from the student loan forgiveness program).

The last time I checked, this type of data was not available in the 2020 Census. Trump also tampered with the 2020 Census to the extent that is hard to know if it is reliable.

[ancianita]

44. Sure. Educational attainment over that of the high school diploma population in the OP.

I see it as a good thing to show what percentage per county have attained above high school diplomas. It suggests a fuller look at education level attainment beyond minimal, which is just as useful as a map of the minimal.

I'm sure there is data about college diploma numbers across states that distinguishes between bachelor, master and Ph.D levels. It's just that I wanted to fill out the OP's implications about general levels of education in the country.

And yes, I don't trust the 2020 census numbers for counties put out by Trump and his neighbor Wilbur Ross. I really wanted Biden to scrap it and conduct a new census when he got into office. Oh, well. Notice this is dated 2015, so its source is still the 2010 county population counts.

[Joinfortmill]

36. That's depressing

[Irish_Dem]

46. Yes it is a very sad map.

[BlackSkimmer]

38. Good lord. Nothing more recent?

2007-2011?

[keopeli]

39. That one tiny dark blue spot in NM is Los Alamos, of course. Great place to live!

[eppur_se_muova]

45. FL's blue spots correlate well with military bases ...

AL's correlate solidly w/University towns (and Auburn on the Eastern edge), though not with the biggest campus in Tuscaloosa, oddly enough.

[Irish_Dem]

50. Yes I noticed that too, the correlation with military bases.

Especially the Air Force.

[CRK7376]

47. What a sad painful map

I've spent 20 years teaching in title 1 schools and it is extremely frustrationg, all this current blame being blasted at the the teachers/admin teams. We do our best, little support form the city/county/state, Feds and then Covid. Ane not having to deal with crazies at every School Board meeting and idiots like DeSANTIS and the clowns in my home states, NC. This BS is part of the reason I am retiring from teaching next June.

[Irish_Dem]

49. A very difficult job made impossible now.

[Irish_Dem]

48. The US may not be educated enough to maintain its democracy.

A democracy depends upon an educated populace.

[Better Days Ahoy]

51. In addition to GOP strongholds showing the under-educated areas

It also shows a number of MSAs with larger areas of immigration from other countries, including Springfield, MA, MSA. Both contribute to the stats. We need the detailed data -- but agree 100% with the implied remark.

[meadowlander]

52. I think this reflects the culture of the Evangelical South to some extent.

If you're a girl, what's the point of graduating high school? You're just going to get married and start cranking out babies anyway. It would be interesting to see a gender breakdown for the states with low educational attainment. I suspect it's appalling.

If you're a boy, you're just as likely to get a job through family or church networks than by answering an ad and interviewing. If you can get a job on the family farm or your uncle's car lot or you dad's friend's wives restaurant or your friend at church's dad's landscaping business or meatpacking plant or auto repair shop, why bother with graduating? Most of the jobs don't require a diploma either.

But then these states that haven't put any money into education or infrastructure wonder why they're being passed over by the big tech companies and other major employers.

[LeftInTX]

53. Dallas is more educated than Austin!

Take that Silicon Hills!

Please do a taco map!

South Texas could use some love!