Percentage of adults with degrees increases

The U.S. Census Bureau released a trove of new data Thursday from the American Community Survey. Among the findings: In 2014, 30 percent of adults 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree or higher. That’s up from about 28 percent five years earlier. For the first time, women were more likely to have a bachelor’s degree than men.

The Census Bureau looked at two five-year periods, from 2005 to 2009 and 2010 to 2014. Of the approximately 3,100 counties in the United States, 1,000 saw increases in the percentage of adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Only 60 counties had decreases.

“This is happening in rural areas, in urban areas, in the north, south, east and west,” said Kurt Bauman, chief of the education branch at the U.S. Census Bureau. “There’s an increase in educational attainment in counties everywhere.”  

The U.S. is still far behind other developed countries in producing college graduates, said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. One big reason, he said, is the growing cost.

“We’re going to have to find a whole new way to do college,” Carnevale said. “We’ve got to figure out how we can provide more college, more efficiently, and at lower cost.”

Too many students start college and never finish, he said. According to recent data from the National Student Clearinghouse, of the three million people who started college in 2009, a little more than half of them graduated six years later.