Research Proposal Report

Introduction

The educational attainment in U.S.A varies across the different States and counties in the country. To evaluate how different counties range in the level of education, a study was done to determine the educational attainment of the U.S citizens. The report presents the questions for the study, source and data used, the methodology used to collect and analyze data and the results of the study. The analysis is based on the recent data for 2013-2017 (Data.gov, 2018).

Research Questions

The research questions of the study are;

i. Which State has the highest number of people with highest level of education

ii. Which level of education does the majority of the residents of U.S.A belong

Data

The dataset used for the research study relates to the educational attainment for the U.S., States and counties that ranges from 1970 – 2017 obtained from data.gov. The data was organized based on states and counties from each state. The educational attainment variable was categorized on 20 levels: Less than a high school diploma to bachelor’s degree or higher. Based in the 56 states, (including United States and Puerto Rico), the counties for each State are presented as they are (Hursh, 2017). The distribution of each educational level attainment was provided at the county level for every state. The dataset contains 3,278 observations with 40 variables (the categories and percentage of each category in the county). The data was obtained in the excel format. The person responsible for the collection of data on educational attainment is Tim Parker, [email protected].

Methodology

The study methodology was excel in which data sorting, preparation and analysis was done. The excel data analysis Tool Pak was used frequently due to its capacity to analyze raw data easily. States which does not contain all the data in every field were cleansed from the dataset. The summary statistics such as mean, median, variance and standard deviation were determined. Tables and graphs were used to analyze the trend and relationship of various categories from the dataset.

Results

The result shows that the State of California recorded the highest number of adults with Bachelors’ degree or above totaling to approximately 17 million. The States of Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania follows although with a very big difference in that order respectively. Other States recorded less than 5 million Bachelor’s degrees in 2013-2017. The results are present in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Bachelor’s Degrees per State

Based on the educational level attainment for the majority of the citizens in United States, in 2013-2017, Figures 2 and 3 shows that majority of the people have high school diplomas and above. As shown in the figures, very few individuals have less than a high school diploma in all States. However, Bachelors’ degree or high seem to be the educational attainment in most states with most of them having more than 25% of the total educational attainments for its citizens. Nevertheless, high school diploma and college associates follow each other closely (Data.gov, 2018). Less than high school diploma is small since most States record less than 15% of the individuals fall in this category apart from Puerto Rico with 25%.