Education Attainment levels by State

The other day I talked about the history of education attainment  in the US over the decades from 1940 to 2000.    Today I'll look at the 2009 education attainment data for individual states.   I got the images and data below from the Census report : Educational Attainment in the United States: 2009


First here's the map of the US showing how many people have completed high school by county:

(click image for full size)

Wyoming and Hawaii do a nice job of completing high school.  As you can see both states are solid red.    Rural areas of the South seem to have the lower completion rates in general.

Second here is the same map showing the % of population with Bachelors:

(click image for full size)

One thing these maps do is highlight the differences between rural and urban areas.   You can see red spots focused around locations of major cities.   Then there are white spots filling in the many of the rural areas.

Finally there are the state level % figures for high school an Bachelors:

	High School	Bachelors
Alabama	82.1	22
Alaska.	91.4	26.6
Arizona	84.2	25.6
Arkansas.	82.4	18.9
California.	80.6	29.9
Colorado.	89.3	35.9
Connecticut.	88.6	35.6
Delaware.	87.4	28.7
D.C.	87.1	48.5
Florida.	85.3	25.3
Georgia.	83.9	27.5
Hawaii.	90.4	29.6
Idaho.	88.4	23.9
Illinois.	86.4	30.6
Indiana.	86.6	22.5
Iowa.	90.5	25.1
Kansas.	89.7	29.5
Kentucky.	81.7	21
Louisiana.	82.2	21.4
Maine.	90.2	26.9
Maryland.	88.2	35.7
Massachusetts.	89	38.2
Michigan	87.9	24.6
Minnesota.	91.5	31.5
Mississippi.	80.4	19.6
Missouri.	86.8	25.2
Montana.	90.8	27.4
Nebraska.	89.8	27.4
Nevada	83.9	21.8
Hampshire.	91.3	32
New Jersey.	87.4	34.5
New Mexico.	82.8	25.3
New York.	84.7	32.4
North Carolina.	84.3	26.5
North Dakota.	90.1	25.8
Ohio.	87.6	24.1
Oklahoma	85.6	22.7
Oregon.	89.1	29.2
Pennsylvania.	87.9	26.4
Rhode Island.	84.7	30.5
South Carolina.	83.6	24.3
South Dakota.	89.9	25.1
Tennessee.	83.1	23
Texas.	79.9	25.5
Utah.	90.4	28.5
Vermont.	91	33.1
West Virginia.	86.6	34
Washington.	89.7	31
Virginia.	82.8	17.3
Wisconsin	89.8	25.7
Wyoming.	91.8	23.8

The top 5  for high school completion are :

Wyoming.	91.8
Minnesota.	91.5
Alaska.	91.4
Hampshire.	91.3
Vermont.	91

The bottom 5 are :

Texas.	79.9
Mississippi.	80.4
California.	80.6
Kentucky.	81.7
Alabama	82.1

The top 5 for college degree attainment are (excluding D.C.):

Massachusetts.	38.2
Colorado.	35.9
Maryland.	35.7
Connecticut.	35.6
New Jersey.	34.5

The bottom 5 are :

Virginia.	17.3
Arkansas.	18.9
Mississippi.	19.6
Kentucky.	21
Louisiana.	21.4

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