Matt Yglesias had an indirect hit on an important piece of data this morning. In the post, he uses Census data to show that a majority of Americans attend college. What he glosses over in the process, though, is that 17 percent of Americans in 2007 reported their highest level of educational attainment as "some college, no degree." In other words,
about a fifth of adult Americans are college dropouts (represented by the red slice in the pie chart above). We have almost as many college dropouts age 25 and up as we do adults with associate's, Master's, professional, and doctorate degrees combined.
3 comments:
First off 17% isn't almost 38%, the number of "dropouts" as compared to all college degrees combined as stated above. Second, if the students who left without a degree didn't receive the one they sought then they're dropouts. Some of the 17% may have never intended to complete a degree. Additionally, some of the students with associate's degrees may have received them as a consolation prize making them dropout equivalents. There is too much information lacking from this simple graphic to label populations and draw conclusions.
Notice that I left off bachelor's degrees in that statement. Second, the data come from the Census asking individuals their highest level of education. So this isn't some college counting them as dropouts when they might have received a degree elsewhere. 17% of Americans self-identify as "some college, no degree." In other words, a dropout.
Chad,
I wholeheartedly disagree that "some college, no degree" = dropout.
It took me 8 years to finish college, since I had to put myself through it, so, at the age of 25, I would've answered that census question as "some college, no degree". No, I wasn't a drop out. At the age of 26 I got a BS in Engineering. Two of my closest friends from that time also got their BS in Engineering after 25. One got married right out of HS and started a family, then 3 years after HS went to college, the other was in a situation similar to mine and took 9 years to finish. Neither of us at any time dropped out, yet, all of us, at the age of 25 would've answered "some college, no degree".
For another scenario, my oldest brother went straight from High School to working. At the age of 30, he got a pretty good entry-level job working for a state agency. However, as he started moving up, he realized he lacked some skills to get promoted, so he took some courses at the community college to learn computers, word processing, and excel. Again, he would have answered as "some college, no degree", but he never was a college dropout. As Anonymous before me stated, he never intended to get a degree.
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