The educational attainment of young adults in Louisville lays the groundwork for the academic outcomes of future generations. An educated workforce is also important to establishing 21st-century jobs to make Louisville competitive in the modern economy. College attainment among young adults is an important indicator of the effectiveness of Louisville’s educational system and its ability to attract educated workers from other cities.
Louisville currently ranks 10th among its peer cities in the percent of young adults with bachelor’s degrees, with 39.4% of young adults having earned a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Louisville is in the middle cluster of its peer group according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers, cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red are a group that lags behind its peers on this indicator.
While 32.7% of young adults hold bachelor’s degrees or higher in Louisville, the prevalence of degrees varies substantially across the city. In the map to the left, areas where more young adults have bachelor’s degrees or higher are purple, while areas where fewer young adults hold bachelor’s degrees or higher are white. Similar to other maps of post-secondary degrees, there is a distinct divide between western and eastern Louisville.
Post-secondary educational achievement is most concentrated the Highlands where nearly 64% of the young adult population have at least a bachelor’s degree. Conversely, the lowest concentration of earned bachelor’s degrees can be seen in the Portland neighborhood, where less than 3% of young adults have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Scroll over the map to see values for each neighborhood. Zoom in to see street names that form that boundaries of each neighborhood.
Louisville has improved fairly consistently in attainment of bachelor’s degrees or higher, however, the city has fallen behind the peer mean since 2010. Thirty-eight percent of Louisville young adults currently have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Since 2000, Louisville has outperformed both the least and most improved cities, Memphis and Greenville, respectfully. However, Louisville is currently 2.1 percentage points below the peer mean.
The gap between whites and Blacks in the rate of obtainment of bachelor’s degrees or higher has not decreased since the year 2000. The rate of degrees among whites is more than double that for Blacks. Both groups are near their respective 25th percentiles.
Females in Louisville continue to obtain bachelor’s degrees or higher at a rate higher than than their male counterparts. The female peer mean has consistently outperformed the rate for females in Louisville, however the gap is decreasing from a 2012 gap high. Louisville males have hovered around their peer mean since 2008, but fell slightly behind in 2016.
For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.
Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).
Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.
