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Educational Attainment by Iowa Census Tract -- 2016

Keith Greiner

August 9, 2020

Educational attainment is important to society because people with post high school degrees enjoy an improved life, improved health, improved personal enjoyment, and improved income. They become better, more visionary, leaders and that make valuable contributions to society.

The College Board’s annual publication, Education Pays (https://trends.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/education-pays-2016-full-report.pdf) for 2016 included three central categories of benefits of higher education. Following are three summary statements from the report.

• “Median earnings increase with level of education, [although] there is considerable variation in earnings at each level of educational attainment.”
• “College education increases the chance that adults will move up the socioeconomic ladder and reduces the chance that adults will rely on public assistance.”
• “Individuals with higher levels of education earn more, pay more taxes, and are more likely than others to be employed.”

Unfortunately, the Republican U. S. Congress and Republican-controlled state legislatures continue to reduce support for higher education.

This essay shows the status of post-high-school educational attainment for Iowa for 2016.

About 27 of every one hundred Iowans aged 25 and over has a Bachelor’s degree or greater. In the U. S. the percentage is about 31 of every one hundred. The numbers for Iowa, like the numbers for all states, suggest that in this country with outstanding educational opportunities, people with four-year degrees continue to be a minority. In Iowa, they are even more of a minority.

As with most averages, the percentage for Iowa tells only part of the story. In Iowa, there are 825 census tracts. Within that group of census tracts the percentage ranges from 84.9% for Tract 23 in Johnson County (Iowa City), to only 2.6% for Tract 14 in Woodbury County (Sioux City). The map shown below summarizes the state and gives an overview of the distribution. Values in the key are proportions. Multiply by 100 to see them as percentages.

The graph shown below shows the distribution of percentages. What we see there are 119 tracts with percentages of 40% or more while 120 tracts have percentages less than 13%.

Table 1 shows the top 20 census tracts.

Table 2 shows the bottom 23 counties. The last three are in that position because data are missing for educational attainment.

These data were provided by the Iowa Census Data Center (http://www.iowadatacenter.org/).

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