In an impressive increase from years past, 39 percent of women in the United States had completed four years or more of college in 2022. This figure is up from 3.8 percent of women in 1940. A significant increase can also be seen in males, with 36.2 percent of the U.S. male population having completed four years or more of college in 2022, up from 5.5 percent in 1940.

4- and 2-year colleges

In the United States, college students are able to choose between attending a 2-year postsecondary program and a 4-year postsecondary program. Generally, attending a 2-year program results in an Associate’s Degree, and 4-year programs result in a Bachelor’s Degree.

Many 2-year programs are designed so that attendees can transfer to a college or university offering a 4-year program upon completing their Associate’s. Completion of a 4-year program is the generally accepted standard for entry-level positions when looking for a job.

Earnings after college

Factors such as gender, degree achieved, and the level of postsecondary education can have an impact on employment and earnings later in life. Some Bachelor’s degrees continue to attract more male students than female, particularly in STEM fields, while liberal arts degrees such as education, languages and literatures, and communication tend to see higher female attendance.

All of these factors have an impact on earnings after college, and despite nearly the same rate of attendance within the American population between males and females, men with a Bachelor’s Degree continue to have higher weekly earnings on average than their female counterparts.

In 2022, about 37.7 percent of the U.S. population who were aged 25 and above had graduated from college or another higher education institution, a slight decline from 37.9 the previous year. However, this is a significant increase from 1960, when only 7.7 percent of the U.S. population had graduated from college. Demographics Educational attainment varies by gender, location, race, and age throughout the United States. Asian-American and Pacific Islanders had the highest level of education, on average, while Massachusetts and the District of Colombia are areas home to the highest rates of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher. However, education levels are correlated with wealth. While public education is free up until the 12th grade, the cost of university is out of reach for many Americans, making social mobility increasingly difficult. Earnings White Americans with a professional degree earned the most money on average, compared to other educational levels and races. However, regardless of educational attainment, males typically earned far more on average compared to females. Despite the decreasing wage gap over the years in the country, it remains an issue to this day. Not only is there a large wage gap between males and females, but there is also a large income gap linked to race as well.

This dataset shows the Principal statistics of college & university education, 2002 - 2014 Source: Department of Statistics, Malaysia

This table contains data on the percent of population age 25 and up with a four-year college degree or higher for California, its regions, counties, county subdivisions, cities, towns, and census tracts. Greater educational attainment has been associated with health-promoting behaviors including consumption of fruits and vegetables and other aspects of healthy eating, engaging in regular physical activity, and refraining from excessive consumption of alcohol and from smoking. Completion of formal education (e.g., high school) is a key pathway to employment and access to healthier and higher paying jobs that can provide food, housing, transportation, health insurance, and other basic necessities for a healthy life. Education is linked with social and psychological factors, including sense of control, social standing and social support. These factors can improve health through reducing stress, influencing health-related behaviors and providing practical and emotional support. More information on the data table and a data dictionary can be found in the Data and Resources section. The educational attainment table is part of a series of indicators in the Healthy Communities Data and Indicators Project (HCI) of the Office of Health Equity. The goal of HCI is to enhance public health by providing data, a standardized set of statistical measures, and tools that a broad array of sectors can use for planning healthy communities and evaluating the impact of plans, projects, policy, and environmental changes on community health. The creation of healthy social, economic, and physical environments that promote healthy behaviors and healthy outcomes requires coordination and collaboration across multiple sectors, including transportation, housing, education, agriculture and others. Statistical metrics, or indicators, are needed to help local, regional, and state public health and partner agencies assess community environments and plan for healthy communities that optimize public health. More information on HCI can be found here: https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/OHE/CDPH%20Document%20Library/Accessible%202%20CDPH_Healthy_Community_Indicators1pager5-16-12.pdf

The format of the educational attainment table is based on the standardized data format for all HCI indicators. As a result, this data table contains certain variables used in the HCI project (e.g., indicator ID, and indicator definition). Some of these variables may contain the same value for all observations.

Data from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities' College Enrolment Statistical Reporting system.

Provides aggregated key enrolment data for college students, such as:

• Fall term headcount enrolment by campus, credential pursued and level of study
• Fall term headcount enrolment by program and Classification of Instructional Program
• Fall term headcount enrolment by student status in Canada and country of citizenship by institution
• Fall term headcount enrolment by student demographics (e.g., gender, age, first language)

To protect privacy, numbers are suppressed in categories with less than 10 students.

Related

• College enrolments - 1996 to 2011
• University enrolment
• Enrolment by grade in secondary schools
• School enrolment by gender
• Second language course enrolment
• Course enrolment in secondary schools
• Enrolment by grade in elementary schools

Market Size statistics on the Colleges & Universities industry in the US

Graph and download economic data for Consumer Unit Characteristics: Percent Black or African American by Highest Education: Less Than College Graduate: Less Than High School Graduate (CXU980270LB1403M) from 2012 to 2023 about no college, consumer unit, secondary schooling, African-American, secondary, education, percent, and USA.

In the 2021/22 academic year, about 4.1 million higher education degrees were earned in the United States. By the 2031/32 academic year, this figure is projected to increase to about 4.83 million degrees.

The Colleges and Universities feature class/shapefile is composed of all Post Secondary Education facilities as defined by the Integrated Post Secondary Education System (IPEDS, http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/), National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, https://nces.ed.gov/), US Department of Education for the 2018-2019 school year. Included are Doctoral/Research Universities, Masters Colleges and Universities, Baccalaureate Colleges, Associates Colleges, Theological seminaries, Medical Schools and other health care professions, Schools of engineering and technology, business and management, art, music, design, Law schools, Teachers colleges, Tribal colleges, and other specialized institutions. Overall, this data layer covers all 50 states, as well as Puerto Rico and other assorted U.S. territories. This feature class contains all MEDS/MEDS+ as approved by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Homeland Security Infrastructure Program (HSIP) Team. Complete field and attribute information is available in the ”Entities and Attributes” metadata section. Geographical coverage is depicted in the thumbnail above and detailed in the "Place Keyword" section of the metadata. This feature class does not have a relationship class but is related to Supplemental Colleges. Colleges and Universities that are not included in the NCES IPEDS data are added to the Supplemental Colleges feature class when found. This release includes the addition of 175 new records, the removal of 468 no longer reported by NCES, and modifications to the spatial location and/or attribution of 6682 records.

The Institutional Data Archive on American Higher Education (IDA) contains academic data on 384 four-year colleges and universities in the United States. The IDA is one of two databases produced by the Colleges and Universities 2000 project based at the University of California, Riverside. This release, the third compilation of the IDA, is updated through academic year 2010-2011, and includes longitudinal and cross-sectional data from multiple sources. The collection is organized into nine datasets based on the unit of analysis and whether identifiers linking the data to particular institutions are present; seven of the datasets can be linked by a common identifier variable (PROJ_ID), and two cannot be linked due to confidentiality agreements. The seven identifiable datasets contain information on institutions, university systems, programs and academic departments, earned degrees, graduate schools, medical schools, and institutional academic rankings over time. Data regarding student enrollments, average SAT and ACT scores, and tuition and fees has been recorded, as well as institutional information concerning libraries, research activity, revenue and expenditures, faculty salaries, and quality rankings for program faculty. The identifiable datasets also include census information for neighborhoods surrounding IDA colleges and universities. The two non-identifiable datasets contain confidential survey responses from IDA institution presidents, chancellors, provosts, and academic vice presidents; survey questions pertained to governance structures, institutional goals and achievements, and solicited opinions on current and future issues facing the respondent's institution and higher education in general.

This map shows the percentage of people age 25+ whose highest education level is some college. This is shown by state, county, and census tracts throughout the US. Zoom to any city to see the pattern there, or use one of the bookmarks to explore different areas.Some college education means that the individual has some college credits, but no degree. For more information from the Census Bureau, click here.The pop-up is configured to show the overall breakdown of educational attainment for the population 25+. The data shown is current-year American Community Survey (ACS) data from the US Census Bureau. The data is updated each year when the ACS releases its new 5-year estimates. For more information about the data, visit this page.To learn more about when the ACS releases data updates, click here.

This study contains data obtained from one-third of a national sample of college and university faculty surveyed under the sponsorship of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education (see CARNEGIE COMMISSION NATIONAL SURVEY OF HIGHER EDUCATION: FACULTY STUDY, 1969 [ICPSR 7501]). The original data were collected by the Survey Research Center, University of California at Berkeley, while the subsample was provided by the Social Science Data Center at the University of Connecticut. The subsample for the present study was randomly drawn and the 20,008 selected respondents were weighted to 148,372. The variables provide information on the faculty's social and educational backgrounds and professional activities, their views on a wide range of social and political issues, and opinions on educational policy. Demographic data cover age, sex, race, marital status, number of children, religion, income, and parents' levels of education and occupations. In addition to the original survey data, this study includes a number of derived measures in the form of indexes and scales.

This data comes from the HEA's Student Record System (SRS). These are annual returns submitted to the HEA by each of the HEA-funded higher education institutions in Ireland. For further information, please visit www.hea.ie/statistics.

The consolidated (CN) survey form was used for the first time in 1990-1991 to collect information from a subset of the 10,500 postsecondary institutions in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) universe. IPEDS collects information on such topics as institutional characteristics, enrollments, completions, finance, staff, and libraries. All schools in the IPEDS universe were asked to complete an institutional characteristics form. Approximately 3,600 institutions of higher education (i.e., those that are accredited at the college level by an agency recognized by the Secretary, United States Department of Education) plus another 400 nonaccredited schools that grant a bachelor's, master's, doctoral, or first-professional degree were asked to complete the full complement of IPEDS surveys. Of the remaining 6,500 postsecondary schools who were eligible to receive the Consolidated (CN) survey form, 2,998 schools were sent the form, of which 2,472 responded. The following data were requested from institutions using the CN survey form: (1) fall enrollment for 1990, by racial/ethnic category and sex of student, (2) completions for the 1989-1990 academic year, by field of study and award level and by racial/ethnic category and sex of recipient, (3) financial statistics for fiscal year 1990, including revenue/tuition fees, expenditures/scholarship, and other expenditures, and (4) selected data on libraries on total FTE staff, operating expenses, and total circulation transactions. The single CN form was substituted for the four more detailed IPEDS surveys that were sent to the accredited/degree-granting institutions. Data for the CN respondent institutions appear on both the CN file and on the individual IPEDS adapt files for the fall enrollment, completions, finance, and libraries surveys.

This dataset is accessed from https://www.kaggle.com/jessemostipak/college-tuition-diversity-and-pay and was downloaded on August 4, 2021.

The following excerpt is from Kaggle regarding the sources of this dataset:

The data this week comes from many different sources but originally came from the US Department of Education.

Tuition and fees by college/university for 2018-2019, along with school type, degree length, state, in-state vs out-of-state from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Diversity by college/university for 2014, along with school type, degree length, state, in-state vs out-of-state from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Example diversity graphics from Priceonomics. Average net cost by income bracket from TuitionTracker.org. Example price trend and graduation rates from TuitionTracker.org Salary potential data comes from payscale.com.

This dataset included the following files:

1. diversity_school.csv

2. historical_tuition.csv

3. salary_potential.csv

4. tuition_cost.csv

5. tuition_income.csv

After data cleaning, the data in diversity_school.csv and tuition_cost.csv were merged and the data in salary_potential.csv and tuition_income.csv were merged. The combined datasets were then split based on the US Census Regions into West, Midwest, Northeast and South (https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/maps/reference/us_regdiv.pdf).

As of 2022, 51.4 percent of Americans aged 20 to 21 years were enrolled in higher education institutions in the United States, a considerable increase compared to 31.9 percent enrolled in 1970. For Americans aged 18 to 19, 46.5 percent were enrolled in higher education in 2022.

Statistics of international students in Taiwanese universities and colleges

Russell, Lauren C., Yu, Lei, and Andrews, Michael J., (2024) “Higher Education and Local Educational Attainment: Evidence from the Establishment of U.S. Colleges.” Review of Economics and Statistics 106:4, 1146–1156.