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Education Levels
About This Indicator
What Does This Chart Show?
Adults 25 and over split by the most schooling they finished: less than high school, high school, some college or an associate degree, and a bachelor's degree or more. From the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, and the census for 1940, 1950, and 1960. Before 1992 the survey asked years of school, not degrees.
What It Says
In 1940 three in four adults had not finished high school and fewer than one in twenty had four years of college. As schooling spread, a diploma went from setting a worker apart to being the floor, and employers began asking for degrees for work once done without one.
Key Idea
Schooling is mostly finished by 25, so this donut changes as older adults are replaced by younger ones, and it reflects the schooling of decades past. The some-college slice also holds many who started college and left without a degree, some carrying loans for a degree they never finished.
Source: Census Bureau. Current Population Survey Historical Table A-1 (taba-1); CPS ASEC public-use microdata (api.census.gov) for years after the table's last row.
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