The Places You'll Go: Post-Graduation Plans of County Graduates (2015)

Here is data from the County Report Cards of the NYS Education Department showing what the post-graduation plans were for graduates in 2015. Click the graphic to enlarge it.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Declining Enrollment in Colleges

According to data from the Census Bureau, as cited on this post at Demo Memo, national college enrollment fell for the third year in a row in 2014. While getting local numbers of college enrollments isn't possible as far as I know without contacting the local schools directly, there is this interesting data (as shown in the chart below) graphing the percentage of regional 18 to 24 year olds who were enrolled in college between 2008 and 2014. Click on the graph to enlarge it.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Indexing Our Community Opportunities

The Opportunity Index, created by Opportunity Nation and Measure of America, is designed to provides a snapshot of what opportunity looks like at the state and county levels. The Index focuses on the conditions present in different communities and is designed to help local communities connect economic, academic, civic and other factors that support increased opportunity and economic mobility.

The Opportunity Index is made up of a set of indicators grouped into three broad dimensions: Jobs and Economy; Education;  and Community Health and Civic Life.

Below is the summary for Herkimer County. Visit The Opportunity Index to see how your community fares.

Fields of Study for Men and Women with Bachelor Degrees in Herkimer County

In looking at the graphic below, note the top two or three fields of study for men and women in Herkimer County among residents age 25 and older. Also note how they vary according to age of the degree holder - for example, while Science and Engineering are the second most popular fields for getting a bachelor's degree among Herkimer County females, it is the TOP field among younger females. In fact more young females (age 25 to 39) have bachelors degrees in science and engineering in Herkimer County than do males in the same age range.

Click to Enlarge

The Relationship Between Poverty, Educational Attainment, and Gender

The two graphics below show the poverty rates for persons age 25 and over in Herkimer County. The first one is for ALL people age 25 and over based on education attainment; the second breaks the educational attainment categories into males and females. This allows the viewer to see the impact of not having an high school degree, for example, on both men and women when it comes to being in poverty.

Click to enlarge either graphic.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

School District Profiles: An Example Using the Herkimer Central School District

One of the things that is relatively easy to get from the ACS is data on school districts. The typical four profiles are available (Demographic, Economic, Social and Housing) and can be saved and printed as pdfs.

Below I've put together an infographic comparing some of the data from the Herkimer Central School District (HCSD) profiles with those of the county as whole. Perhaps someone would find similar data of use for their local district. You can click the image to enlarge it for easier reading.

Click to Enlarge

Regional College Enrolled Foreign Born Population (2012)

The Utica Observer Dispatch had an article today about the challenges facing foreign born refugees when enrolling in college. They cite several difficulties including language hurdles. In an effort to look more comprehensively at the issues brought up in the article. I've put together several graphics based on our regional foreign-born college-enrolled population.

The data comes from the 2012 Five Year ACS Estimates for our regional PUMAs. Click on any of the graphics below to enlarge them and take a closer look at this intriguing population.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

 

Click to Enlarge

Regional Income Variations By Race, Sex and Education Levels

Recently there have been several news articles locally and nationally drawing attention to the variations in income and employment between minorities and non-minorities. Taking a quick look at the regional data for Herkimer and Oneida Counties in the PUMS files, some interesting numbers can be found. Below is a chart showing the mean income over the last 12 months when respondents were surveyed through the American Communities Survey. These data are part of the ACS Five Year estimates for 2012.

As seen below, white males make the most when compared to their male counterparts among blacks, Asians and Hispanics. While white females generally make more annually than do their black cohorts, Asian and Hispanic females appear to generally average more income than do white females.

Click to Enlarge

The one thing that clearly stands out when looking at that graphic, as well as the table below, is how poorly black males and females perform financially compared to their cohorts, regardless of their educational levels. Black men and women are consistently paid less than almost every other similarly educated group. The table below shows the overall ranking of each of the 32 groups examined, and provides some break out of women, blacks, Asians and Hispanics for comparison purposes.

Click to Enlarge

SAM I Am: Student Achievement Measures and Post-Secondary Graduation Rates

Ever wonder how long it takes to graduate college?  Or better yet, what percent of students who start at a particular college end up graduating from there?

Well the Student Achievement Measure (SAM) tracks student movement across post-secondary institutions to provide a more complete picture of undergraduate student progress and completion within the higher education system. Usual measures of student progress and completion, including government-led efforts, usually underreport student achievement because they do not account for an increasingly mobile student population. SAM is an alternative to the federal graduation rate, which is limited to tracking the completion of first-time, full-time students at one institution. 

Nationally, more than one in five students who complete a degree do so at an institution other than the one where they started, according to a recent study by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Yet the typical method for calculating graduation rates, as stipulated by federal legislation, counts only those students who enroll full-time and then start and finish at their first college or university. SAM better accounts for the success of these students.

 

There are two models included in SAM, one for students enrolled in bachelor’s degree programs and one for students enrolled in associate’s degree or certificate programs. The associate's model provide the following for both full time and part time students: 

• The percent that graduated within 6 years of first enrolling in the initial institution;
• The percent that are still enrolled in the initial institution after 6 years;
• The percent that have transferred to a different institution;
• The percent whose current status is unknown.

The bachelor's model provides slightly more information:

• The percent that graduated within 6 years of first enrolling in the initial institution;
• The percent that are still enrolled in the initial institution after 6 years;
• The percent that have transferred to,  and graduated from, a different institution;
• The percent that have transferred to,  and still enrolled at, a different institution;
• The percent whose current status is unknown.

 Below is a listing of colleges that participate in the program in New York State. The institutions shaded in green have active files reviewable by visiting the SAM Participants page and selecting New York State and then clicking on the college name (only those with hyperlinks have participated long enough to have useable data).

2012 SAT Scores by School District

Wondering how your district does in preparing your child for the SATs? Bizjournal.com has a great site where you can select your region, and your county to see all of the local schools scores on the SAT for the 2012 year (which is the most recent released by the Department of Education).

Simply click the link above then pick your region, and the county you live in and search to see all of the districts.

Below are the ranks for Herkimer and Oneida Counties.

Click to Enlarge

Changes in Workforce Education: A Historical Review of Education Levels Among People 25 and Older (1960 to 2010)

Long gone (or almost long gone) are the days of the one room school house where once you attained the ability to read and write you were pretty much on your own and pushed out the door. Schooling has made great strides and we find ourselves attending educational settings for longer and longer periods of time in our lives. The charts below are simply a look back to a time when the vast majority of our population got no more than a high school education, until now when more than half of all residents get at least some college exposure.

You can see in the chart below how more than half of all persons age 25 and older didn't even finish high school in 1960 - 61% of residents had a formal education consisting of less than a high school diploma. Only an additional 25% had graduated from high school. So in total 86% of the working age population had a high school education or less. At the same time, only about one in fifteen people had college diplomas, or around 7% of the workforce.

Click to Enlarge

By 2010, these numbers change dramatically. Using the 2012 Five Year ACS data, more than one in five people age 25 or older now have at least a bachelor's degree (22%). The proportion of the workforce that has only a high school diploma or less has been cut in almost half, down to 45%.

What's interesting about this change is how "straight lined" it appears to be when you look at it graphically. In the chart below, a regression has been run on the data providing a "best fit" line for both those with high school diplomas or less, and those with bachelors degrees or more. Notice how close each data point is to the regression line. This is an indication of a strong relationship between, quite simply, the passage of time and the increasing number of people getting higher levels of education. Obviously the value of higher education has increased from 1960 to 2010, and the population age 25 and over has pursued this goal.

Click to Enlarge

These regression lines generate a statistic called the coefficient of determination, which tells us the percent of the response variable (level of education attained) that is explained by a linear progression of (in this case) time. In the case above, more than 97% of the variation in the decline of people attaining a high school diploma or less, and 99% of the increase in people receiving a bachelor's degree or higher, are explained as reflecting an increase in the value of education over time. This trend line would be an extremely strong predictor of how many of our future workforce will be pursuing higher levels of education.

Return on Your College Degree Investment: A Look at Selected Upstate NY Schools

PayScale.com recently took a look at how a degree from specific colleges and universities stack up to one another. As they say, "Attending college is an investment of time and money. Make a decision that will pay off in the long term."  PayScale has ranked almost 1,500 U.S. colleges and universities, including private, public and for-profit schools, to determine the potential financial return of attending each school given the cost of tuition and the payoff in median lifetime earnings associated with each school.

When deciding which college or university to attend, a major factor to consider is if the lifetime earnings you will experience after earning your college degree will make the cost of earning that degree worth it. Otherwise known as Return on Investment (ROI), this performance measure is increasingly being used as a way for top schools to tout their worth. The schools they reviewed were ranked highest-to-lowest on their average 30 year net return on investment for in-state students. The top 10 schools in the country included:

Below are how some local and upstate New York schools fared in the rankings. The 30 Year Net ROI is a measure of how much a graduate of this school will make over 30 years of working, minus what they would have made with as a high school graduate and the cost of attending this particular college (tuition, room, board, fees etc). It is basically their net earnings after 30 years as a graduate of this college.

Click to Enlarge

How Employers View Online Versus Traditional Degrees

With recent data suggesting there has been a decline in college enrollments, perhaps some students, as well as employers, will find themselves looking at the value of online degrees more seriously. many of the local colleges offer online course work, which can be used of course to attain a degree. The question becomes how employers view those online programs when hiring employees.

This info-graphic from Drexel.com suggests that there are three vital criteria employers are looking for when an application comes across their desk from a potential worker who has an online degree: whether the program has accreditation; whether it has a bricks and mortar campus, and whether it has an established brand.

 

The Value of a Two Year Degree

An article at CNN.com about two year degrees suggests that, at least in some cases, a two year associates degree can result in a better pay off than a four year degree. The study, by CollegeMeasure.org, is largely based on a data collected in Texas concerning graduates of technical programs and with certificates in technical fields.

 

The results of the study suggest that the degree a student earns matters, but that there are important variations in returns by program and by institution. This report documents some of the differences in first-year earnings ranging from certificate programs through master’s programs.

 

Among the findings are:

 

• Technical-oriented associate’s degree programs are helping many students successfully enter the labor market by equipping them with skills that are in demand. On average, a year after graduation, students with two-year technical degrees have first-year median earnings of more than $50,000, just over $11,000 more than graduates of bachelor’s degree programs across the state.

 

• Graduates with these two-year technical degrees earn, on average, about $30,000 more than students who completed academically oriented two-year degrees and are now in the labor force.

 

• Certificates are one of the fastest-growing credentials offered by community colleges. The median first-year earnings of certificate holders often exceed those of graduates from academic and technical associate’s programs.

Locally, here's some numbers, broken down by the gender of the graduate, that shows the numbers of Associate Degrees among those age 25 or older in Herkimer and Oneida Counties.

Click to Enlarge

U.S. Census: National College Enrollment Down in 2012

According to a report released by the Census Bureau yesterday, college enrollment in the Fall of 2012 plunged by half a million (467,000) from one year earlier. This decline, which includes both graduate and undergraduate enrollment, follows a period of substantial growth — 3.2 million — between 2006 and 2011.
This decline in college enrollment was driven by older students — that is, those 25 and older. Their enrollment fell by 419,000, while the enrollment of younger students declined by 48,000.
Hispanics didn't follow the trend, as the number enrolled in college grew by 447,000 from 2011 to 2012. Meanwhile, non-Hispanic white enrollment declined by 1.1 million and black enrollment by 108,000. From 2006 to 2012, the percentage of all college students who were Hispanic rose from 11 percent to 17 percent. The percentage who were black also rose (from 14 percent to 15 percent), but the percent of non-Hispanic white students declined from 67 percent to 58 percent.

Locally the number of persons enrolled in college according to the American Communities Survey (ACS)  is considerably higher than it was in the Census 2000. Whereas at the time of the 2000 Census approximately 6.4% of the population 18 and over in Herkimer County, and 7.1% of the population age 18 and over in Oneida County, were enrolled in college, the 2011 ACS Five Year Estimates see these percentages rising to 7.9% and 8.6%, respectively. In both cases (the Census 2000 and the 2011 ACS ) about 80% of Herkimer County college enrollees attend public colleges; while only 61% of college students from Oneida County chose public institutions of higher learning to continue their education.