Education Enrollment and Adult College Enrollment by Age - 2016 ACS

In my previous article, we look at the total adult college enrollment for each state. In this, I would like to take one step further to look into the enrollment by age. In this article, ages are presented in an interval of 3. An age label of 25 is actually the sum of age 24, 25, and 26.

Again, the analysis is post on my public tableau website.

The first chart presents few basic numbers that provided background information for discussion. In the chart, the variable zTtl represents the total population. When select all states, the Millennial's bump at age 25 can clearly be seen. The curve zAttnmntUndr+ represent all people with education attainment of undergraduate degree (associate or bachelor) or above. As shown in the chart, the curve first take a large gain at age 25 when most college students obtained their undergraduate degrees. The curve then peaked at age 31 when few more students finishing their undergraduate degrees and others obtained their graduate degrees. However, keep in mind that, in this age chart, the total population trend also contributes.

Education Attainment and Enrollment by Age - United States ACS 2016

The line zAttnmntNoCllgDgr represents the number of people do not obtained undergraduate degree or above. As can be seen in the chart, the line begins to drop once students begin to obtain their undergraduate degrees. Again, keep in mind, the population trend has its effect as show in the bump around age 55, where, due to the population bump,  the population do not have college degree also show a bump. The remaining two green-blueish lines display the college undergraduate (zEnrllUndr) and graduate (zEnrllGrdt) enrollment. These two lines peaked at age 19 and 25 respectively.


The second chart provide basic information on college-education attainment by age for each state. The variable zpctAttnmntUndr+ shows the percent of population obtained undergraduate degree and above. With all states selected, the United States shows a highest rate of 46% at the age of 34. The other two lines on this chart, zpctAttnmntUndr and zpctAttnmntGrdt, represent the percent of population with the highest degree attainment of undergraduate or graduate degrees.

Education Attainment By Age - United States ACS 2016

The third chart displays two education attainment lines from the first chart (zAttnmntUndr+, and zAttnmntNoCllgDgr) along with a college enrollment line (zNoUndrEnrllUndr+). The college enrollment line counts all students enrolled in both undergraduate and graduate but haven't obtain an undergraduate degree yet. By taking the ratio of zNoUndrEnrllUndr+ against zAttnmntNoCllgDgr we arrived at the forth chart.

Education Attainment and Enrollment By Age - United States ACS 2016

As mentioned above, the forth chart display the ratio between zNoUndrEnrllUndr+ and zAttnmntNoCllgDgr. It shows the fraction of non-college degree earner enrolled in college classes. Conferred to chart three, since at the age of 18, 19, and 20, there were relatively few people (313,517) obtained college degrees, the peak at the age 19 shows that, in US, about 50% of that age group went to college. Also observed on the chart is that, after the peak, the percentage of non-college-degree bearer enrolled in college decreased monotonically. Meaning that the older the people are, the less likely they will enrolled as an adult student. For Adult college enrollment at age 25 (aggregates age 24,25, and 26), the rate are about 15% nationally, and dropped fast to 9% at age 28 ( aggregates 27, 28, and 29).

Non-Degree Bearer Enrollment By Age - United States ACS 2016

A Look At the Adult College Enrollment by State - 2016 ACS

After importing the ACS (American Community Survey) 2016 1-Year PUMS (Public Use Micro Sample) data, the question is what come next? Just holding to sets of data doesn't do anyone any good except taking up disk spaces - in this case, it takes about 2.9GB including both the personal and housing unit data.

With the push of Obama's call for increasing college attainment of 60% by 2020, the adult college enrollment can be an important factor. * Obama, however, did not limited his view to associated degree and above. Researchers have been trying to include all sorts of certificates on their way to compare to the 60% goal.

In this article, we try to measure what percentage of the adult who had not obtained an undergraduate degree is enrolled in college. We defined the adult as anyone who is 25 years old or older. This approach, basically give the traditional high school graduates 6 years to obtain their undergraduate degree before been considered in our measure.

As would be presented in a separate article, our definition of 'adult college enrollment' may not match that mental picture of some of our readers since some reader may only consider individuals that rejoin the college after years of absent as the 'adult college enrollment'. While with our definition, traditional students taking longer than 6 years to obtain their first college are included.

Our result of processing the 2016 ACS 1-Year PUMS is presented at Tableau's public use web site.

In the first chart, we presented three numbers that were used for each state. The first number, NoUndrDgr, is the number of adults 25 years old or older that did not obtained an undergraduate degree (associates or bachelor) yet.The second number, WorkOnUndrDgr, for a state is the number of adults that were defined in the first number that are enrolled in undergraduate college programs. The third number, WorkOnGrdtDgr, for a state is the number of adult that were defined in the first number that are enrolled in college graduate program. Even though traditional wisdom doesn't think the third number is possible, for some states these numbers are perceivable. One possible case is due to medical schools. Because some medical school only require appropriate undergraduate course work and standard testing results to be qualified as applicants, it become possible for these students to enrolled in graduate medical program before obtaining bachelor degree. The other possibilities become possible since some colleges begin to thread bachelor degree and the graduate degree together so that students are enrolled for graduate degree while work toward finishing up bachelor degree with courses that credited for both degree. There were cases, the students will be awarded both degree at the end of the program and resulting graduate school enrollment before finishing up bachelor degree.

The Number for Adult College Enrollment

In the second chart we present the percent of students who were 25 years old or older that had no received an undergraduate degree that are enrolled in college undergraduate program. The chart is intended to rank the states based on the percent of adult college enrollment for adult of 25 years old or older that had not obtained their first undergraduate degree. In this chart, we ignored the third number presented in the first chart just to keep the definition clearer and consider those third number exception cases. The second chart also display the 90% MOE, which represent the range of possible sampling errors.

Adult College Enrollment Rate with 90% MOE

The third chart presents the Adult College Enrollment Rate in the map format.

Adult College Enrollment Rate by States

The forth chart provide the number in a table format and allows user to easily compare selected states. 

Table for Comparing Selected States

The following table lists all states in ranking order.

ST	% Enrolled	90% MOE
UT	3.9%	0.4%
HI	3.8%	0.6%
CA	3.7%	0.1%
DC	3.6%	1.0%
NM	3.4%	0.5%
AK	3.4%	0.8%
RI	3.3%	0.5%
WA	3.2%	0.2%
MD	3.1%	0.3%
CO	3.1%	0.3%
VA	3.0%	0.2%
AZ	3.0%	0.2%
OR	3.0%	0.3%
GA	3.0%	0.2%
NC	2.9%	0.2%
TX	2.9%	0.1%
NV	2.8%	0.3%
ID	2.7%	0.5%
DE	2.7%	0.6%
CT	2.7%	0.3%
KS	2.7%	0.3%
MN	2.6%	0.3%
MI	2.6%	0.2%
SC	2.5%	0.2%
WY	2.5%	0.7%
MA	2.5%	0.2%
FL	2.5%	0.1%
WI	2.4%	0.2%
NH	2.4%	0.4%
IL	2.4%	0.2%
LA	2.4%	0.2%
OH	2.3%	0.2%
NY	2.3%	0.1%
IN	2.3%	0.2%
OK	2.2%	0.3%
MO	2.2%	0.2%
AL	2.1%	0.2%
MT	2.1%	0.5%
NJ	2.1%	0.2%
NE	2.1%	0.4%
TN	2.1%	0.2%
MS	2.0%	0.3%
AR	2.0%	0.3%
ME	2.0%	0.4%
KY	1.9%	0.2%
ND	1.9%	0.8%
VT	1.7%	0.6%
SD	1.7%	0.5%
IA	1.7%	0.2%
PA	1.6%	0.1%
WV	1.5%	0.3%

Continued struggle with IPEDS data

As mentioned earlier, works in automate data importing take enormous amount of dedication and efforts. For those do not appreciate, there is really no need to share the knowledge with them.

Here is an example that demonstrate the kind of work and dedication is needed to solve just one problem that I run into while importing IPEDS data.

One problem format I run into in some IPEDS csv file is: 
...,""some text quoted with two double quote"", ...

As a human, we know this line break the csv convention and most likely any csv file importing program is going to fail.

As a data user, I got few resolutions to consider. If I am only dealing with this file, the fastest way is to just open the file in text editor and modify the line so that the csv file can be imported into my application. If you are thinking this way, most likely you are a data analyst and probably think this is how things should be handled. Since you are higher up in the data food chain, likely, have not appreciate the work and thought of IT professions.

IT professions are likely to view the situation from a much broad point of view and ask questions like: What if this is an error exist in ACS' csv file? - If you know the size of a general ACS' csv file, you will realize that there probably very few text editor can effectively open the file, let alone to locate the error line and fix it.

IT professions may also ask: What if there are other csv files also have this problem? How can I handle this automatically?

One tool a lot of IT profession know about is the sed program. To use the sed to fix this problem it is straight forward:
  sed 's/,"("[^"]{2,}")"/,\1/g; ' InCsv

Unfortunately, if you want to invoke this with VBA, the command become much more complicate:
  Cmd.exe /c ^"sed ^-r ^-n ^'^{s^/^,^"^(^"^[^^^^^"^]^{2^,^}^"^)^"^/^,^\1^/g^; p^;^}^' InCsv ^"

Let's just say this, if you have no clue what we are talking about here, you should appreciate the work of IT professions.