The South Is America's High-School Dropout Factory
America's educational attainment, mapped.
Are Americans educated enough? How you answer that question—which seems to obsess certain newspaper editorial boards—really depends on where in the country you look. Some states compete with the best school systems in the world. Some seem to be racing for the bottom. Today, I wanted to offer up three vivid illustrations of how educationally balkanized we really are, courtesy of the Census Bureau's delightful new interactive data-mapping tool.
First, high school. This map shows the percentage of adults over 25 who have earned a diploma or finished an equivalency program across each county in the lower 48 states. The darker the shade of orange, the higher the graduation rate. Notice the giant pale underbelly stretching below the Mason Dixon line from the Southeast through Texas. That's our Southern dropout belt, where completion rates are largely below 85 percent. The national average, for reference, is about 87 percent.
Still, in the majority of the country, most adults have at least earned a high school diploma or a GED. Not so when it comes to college.
Bachelor's degree holders cluster on the coasts, in major urban centers, and in Colorado. The Northeast's Acela corridor is especially full of them. So while, about 31 percent of American adults have a