Bachelor's Degree+ Rate
The share of adults aged 25 and over who hold a bachelor's degree or a higher qualification.
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The share of adults aged 25 and over who hold a bachelor's degree or higher.
The Census Bureau collects educational attainment by asking for "the highest degree or the highest level of school completed," and instructs people currently enrolled "to report the level of the previous grade attended or the highest degree received" (ACS Subject Definitions).
Four categories sit at or above a bachelor's degree: bachelor's, master's, professional school degree, and doctorate. The Bureau notes that master's degrees "include the traditional MA and MS degrees and field-specific degrees, such as MSW, MEd, MBA, MLS, and MEng," and that professional school degrees "may include those in medicine, dentistry, chiropractic, optometry, osteopathic medicine, pharmacy, podiatry, veterinary medicine, law, and theology." All four are counted here.
The measure is limited to adults aged 25 and over, the age by which most people who will finish a four-year degree have done so. Children and current students do not dilute it.
Attainment is measured where people live, not where they studied. It is a characteristic of the tract's current residents.
Metrics in this family#
Bachelor's-or-higher rate
The current share of adults aged 25 and over at or above a bachelor's degree, taken from the most recent 5-year vintage.
Bachelor's-or-higher trend
Change in that share over 3, 5, or 10 years, chosen in the tool.
Because attainment is itself a rate, its trend is reported as a change in percentage points rather than as a percentage change. Percentage-point changes remain comparable between places at different starting levels; percentage changes of a percentage do not.
Considerations#
Attainment changes in a tract through two quite different mechanisms: residents completing degrees, and residents with degrees moving in or out. The measure cannot distinguish them, so a rising rate is not evidence that local education improved.
Degrees are self-reported and are not verified against institutional records. Qualifications earned outside the United States are reported against the same categories.
ACS 5-year windows overlap. Each vintage shares four of its five years with the vintage before it, so year-over-year movement reflects smoothed rolling estimates rather than independent annual readings. The 5-year and 10-year trends compare vintages whose windows do not overlap at all; the 3-year trend compares vintages that share two years and is damped as a result.
Census tract boundaries were redrawn for the 2020 census. Estimates published on earlier boundaries are carried onto current ones before use — see geography.
In tracts with few adult residents the estimate rests on a small sample and carries a wide margin of error, and a trend built from two such estimates is wider still.
References#
- 1ACS Subject Definitionshttps://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions/2024_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf