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Workforce
Quartiles | Findings | Description
Bachelor's degree holders as share of workforce: 2004
Bachelor's degree holders as share of workforce: 2004
Quartiles
Bachelor's degree holders as share of workforce: 2004*
| 1st Quartile (65.9%–38.6%) |
2nd Quartile (37.4%–34.9%) |
3rd Quartile (34.4%–30.9%) |
4th Quartile (30.5%–25.3%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | Arizona | Alabama | Arkansas |
| Colorado | Delaware | Alaska | Idaho |
| Connecticut | Florida | Kentucky | Indiana |
| District of Columbia | Georgia | Louisiana | Iowa |
| Maryland | Hawaii | Maine | Mississippi |
| Massachusetts | Illinois | Michigan | Nebraska |
| Minnesota | Kansas | Montana | North Dakota |
| New Hampshire | Missouri | Nevada | Oklahoma |
| New Jersey | Oregon | New Mexico | South Dakota |
| New York | Pennsylvania | North Carolina | West Virginia |
| Vermont | Rhode Island | Ohio | Wyoming |
| Virginia | Tennessee | South Carolina | |
| Washington | Utah | Texas | |
| Wisconsin | |||
| *States in alphabetical order, not data order.
SOURCES: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Education and Social Stratification Branch, Educational Attainment in the United States; and U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics. See |
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Findings
- In 2004, 51.8 million individuals held bachelor’s degrees in the United States, up from 36.5 million in 1994.
- Nationwide, the percentage of the workforce with at least a bachelor’s degree rose from 29.5% in 1994 to 37.2% in 2004. The proportion of the workforce with a bachelor’s degree increased considerably in many states. This may reflect a replacement of older cohorts of workers with younger, more-educated ones. It may also indicate the restructuring of state economies to emphasize work that requires more education or credentialism.
- The geographic distribution of bachelor’s degree holders in the workforce bears little resemblance to any of the degree-production indicators, which attests to the considerable mobility of the college-educated population in the United States.
Description
The proportion of a state’s workers with bachelor’s, graduate, and professional degrees is an indicator of the educational and skill levels of its workforce. These workers have a clear advantage over less-educated workers in terms of expected lifetime earnings. A high value for this indicator denotes that a state has a large percentage of workers who completed an undergraduate education.
Degree data, based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), are limited to individuals who are age 25 years and 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.
