Migration of Nebraska Working Age Population via 2011-07 ACS PUMS

20180504 Update: This is a data set that is prepared explicitly for Nebraska Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education (Nebraska CCPE) so that they can proceed with their 2018 Progress Report. The reason for this note is  to increase the chance so people can find the data because CCPE refused to cite this web article as the source of the data

This is simply a release of migration data for Nebraska working age population based on the ACS (American Community Survey) 2011-2007 5-year PUMS (Public Use Microdata Sample) data released by US Census Bureau.

Last year, after publishing the serials of articles about the population migration in the US, I re-examined what I did and spent times in revise the approach using more R codes than manually preparing and running SQL queries. This year, after comparing my R process for 2015-2011 and 2010-2006, I decide to restructure the R codes in an attempt to extract most of the common code to be shared and, hopefully, it will reduce the time spend in maintaining the code in the future. I intended to create R code to replace last year's process for education attainment too.

For this data release, the working age is defined as 22 to 64, inclusive.

Education Degree	Net (In) Migration	90% MOE	Possible Range
1. No High School Diploma	2,130	1,037.3	1092 to 3167
2. Has High School Diploma	35	1,247.1	-1213 to 1282
3. Some College Exp. - No Degree	1,501	1,493.2	7 to 2994
4. Associate's Degree	153	824.8	-672 to 977
5. Bachelor's Degree	89	1,260.9	-1172 to 1349
6. Graduate Degree	-1,733	935.0	-2669 to -798

As can be seen from the above table, for every year during that five-years period, there are, in net, estimated 1,733 people with graduate degree moved out of Nebraska. Since the number is derived from sampling, with 90% of certainty, the true number can lie between 2,669 and 798. So it is very likely (90% certainty) that Nebraska loses about 2,669 to 798 people with graduate degree every year during the five year period.

For population with bachelor degree, the net migration pattern isn't as clear cut as those with graduate degree since, with 90% certainty, the net can vary from 1,172 moving out to 1,349 moving in.


The released data file can be accessed here through Google Drive. The released data includes all weights that is needed to combine education categories if so desired. For data concerning other states, please follow this link.


Related articles: 
Nebraska Brain Drain Migration and Ed. Attainment, 2015 United States ACS 

Brain Drain - 2015 ACS State Migration for Working Age

Updated on Feb. 27, 2017:
An attempt has been made to rank states by brain drain indexes based on migration. See article Brain drain - ranking and analysis with 2015 ACS data.

As will be discussed in my upcoming article about various possible conception/perceptions about the idea of 'brain' in the context of 'brain drain', one of the definition or interpretation would be the education attainment of the workforce, hence, the age range of 22 to 64 years old.

As mentioned in my previous article: Population migration derived from ACS 2015 5-year PUMS dataset, I was in the process of producing a more detailed result from the ACS 2015 5-year PUMS dataset and here it is. For this article, we ignored the in-migration from foreign counties, which was included in the previous article. Time allowed, we will look into foreign country migration in details.

Basically, we look at all samples with age between 22 and 64 years old in the PUMS file along with each sample's education attainment level and the state of residing a year ago. By analyzing these data, we can estimate the number of people moving in and out of a state and with what kind of education attainment level.

It happened that I was attending a Tableau promotion meeting recently and decided to give it a try even though I would have preferred an open source solution, which I did try to look up, but did not have enough time to evaluate them yet.

The rest of this article will simply provide notes to the presentation since I have the baggage of an old IT worker that abbreviates almost everything.

First, the cite of the data source: ACS 2015-2011 5-year PUMS file processed by Dr. Duncan Hsu.

The Brain Drain Migration between states presentation can be found at Tableau Public and below are some of the summaries: 

The first tab/page/slide, "Map - Migrated to To_State", is the in-migration map for the state of interest specified by the right-hand side dropdown control: the To_State. The map will show the number of people moving from each state to the To_State, with the education attainment level you specified by the second dropdown list labeled EdAttnmnt. To see the numbers, hover your mouse above a state of interest. For example, the following chart show that there were 724 people moved from Kansas to Nebraska, which was selected as the 'To_State'. Possible values for the EdAttnmnet dropdown are: Less than High School Degree (LssHsDgr), High School Degree or Equivalent (HsDgrEqv), Some College Experience/Course-work but no degree (SomeCllg), Associate Degree (AssctDgr), Bachelor Degree (BchlrDgr), Master Degree (Mstr), First Professional Degree (FP), and Doctor's Degree (Drs).

In-Migration to Nebraska

The second tab, "Map - Migrated out From_State", is the out-migration map for the state of interest. Operational wise, this is very similar to the first tab. In the map below, it shows that there were 421 people migrated to Iowa from Nebraska, which was selected as the 'From_State'.

Out-Migration from Nebraska

The third tab, "Map - Net migration", shows the net migration. By hover over each state, it shows three numbers, the HdCnt (head count; negative for out-migration and positive for in-migration) and the upper and lower bound for the 90% confidence level. The dropdown to the right displays 6 education attainment levels with the Graduates (Grdts) encompassing  Master, First Professional, and Doctor's degree.

Net-Migration for Nebraska

The fourth tab, is the net migration bar chart for each state where the bar indicated the Margin of Error (MOE) at the 90% confidence level. Again, dropdowns are on the  right.

Net-Migration with 90% MOE

The fifth tab provides the data used in the fourth tab in table format with the upper and lower bound of the 90% MOE.

Net-Migration for Nebraska's neighboring states

The Sixth tab allows selecting states with the map.

Selecting States with Map

ACS 2015 5-year PUMS for database/IT professional

Continue with the ACS PUMS database project, the task is to import the 5-year ACS PUMS product of 2015.

Comparing Census's 2015 Data Dictionary file (PUMS_Data_Dictionary_2011-2015.txt) to that of 2014, we, again, noticed that Census' added leading spaces to a lot of lines to, possibly, make the file more readable for 'human' users. Following the step of processing the 2015 1-year file, I removed those leading spaces via sed before processing it with my definition processor.

Processing the Data Dictionary file with my program, it yields the following parsing errors. Some of them are clearly unintended errors, others may just because Census did not spend time and efforts to establish clear syntax rules so that their products can be machine friendly. Here are the parsing errors:


      ADJINC
        value 1001264, the blank after '1001264' is actually an A0h instead of
          20h.
      TEN
        just before TEN, a two line 'NOTE:'
      PERSON RECORD
        - no blank line after the 'PERSON RECORD' section mark
      ADJINC
        value 100264, the blank after '1001264' is actually an A0h instead of
          20h.
      GCL
        just before GCL, a two line 'NOTE:'
      FPINCP
        no empty line before FPINCP

The A0h one is really interesting. For those of interest, A0h is a NBSP character used in HTML. Without a good hex editor, it takes me a lot of efforts to figure out what is going wrong.