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February 21, 2019 by Gary Price

New Data: Number of Master and Doctoral Degrees Doubles Among U.S. Population

February 21, 2019 by Gary Price

From the U.S. Census:

 

In the last two decades, the number of people with master’s and doctoral degrees has doubled.

Since 2000, the number of people age 25 and over whose highest degree was a master’s has doubled to 21 million, and the number of doctoral degree holders has more than doubled to 4.5 million. In 2000, one-third of people with at least a bachelor’s degree had completed an advanced degree. By 2018, that proportion had grown to 37 percent.

Educational Attainment

About 13.1 percent of U.S. adults have an advanced degree, up from 8.6 percent in 2000.

These findings come from the Census Bureau’s Educational Attainment in the United States: 2018 table package that uses statistics from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement to examine the educational attainment of adults age 25 and older by demographic and social characteristics, such as age, sex, race and Hispanic origin, nativity and disability status.

The data also found that in 2017, on average a person with an advanced degree earned 3.7 times as much as an average high school dropout.

Highlights

Between 2000 and 2018 the percentage of people age 25 and older who had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher increaed by 9 percentage points, from 25.6 percent to 35.0 percent.

The percentage of people age 25 and over who had completed less than a high school diploma or equivalent for men (10.6 percent) was higher than for women (9.8 percent).

Among Asians ages 25 to 29 in 2018, almost 7 in 10 (69.5 percent) had a bachelor’s or higher degree. Five years earlier (in 2013), the bachelor’s attainment rate for this group was 59 percent.

Recent immigrants to the United States are more likely to have a college education than earlier immigrants or U.S. natives. Among immigrants who have arrived since 2000, 38.8 percent have a bachelor’s or higher degree, compared with 35.2 percent of U.S. natives. Among earlier immigrants, the rate college education was lower —31.3 percent for those who arrived in the 1990s.

Naturalized citizens were among the groups with high levels of college attainment, with 38.4 percent having a bachelor’s or higher degree. The children of immigrants were also likely to be bachelor’s degree holders, with 39.6 percent having this or a higher level of education.

Direct to Educational Attainment in the United States: 2018

See Also: Educational Attainment of Mothers Aged 25 and Over: United States, 2017 (Released Feb. 21, 2019 via CDC)
8 pages; PDF.

See Also:  Number of Women with U.S. Doctorates in Science, Engineering, or Health Employed in the United States More Than Doubles since 1997 (Feb. 12, 2019)

Filed under: Data Files, News

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About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.

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