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 11th among its peer cities with 47.9% of young adults having earned at least an associate degree.
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.
Less than half of the young adults in Louisville have an associate degree or higher, and there is a clear geographic divide on where degree holders live. In the map to the left, areas where more adults have associate degrees or higher are purple. Areas where fewer adults hold post-secondary degrees are white. There are much higher rates of degree holders east of I-65.
High attainment of post-secondary degrees is almost exclusively seen in eastern Louisville. The Highlands have the highest percentage of residents with an associate degree or higher at approximately 80%. This is in stark contrast to western Louisville where degree attainment in Portland and Russell measures below 8%.
Scroll over the map to see values for each neighborhood. Zoom in to see street names that form the boundaries of each neighborhood.
Since 2000, more young, adult Louisvillians have obtained their associate degree or higher. For several years, Louisville was at the peer mean. Currently, the city is 1.4% below the peer mean, but remains higher than the 2000 number.
Kansas City is currently the most improved city in our peer group, yet it still falls behind both Louisville and the peer mean. Louisville has slightly diverged from the peer mean since 2015, and currently stands at 46.4%. Memphis continues to be the least improved city in our peer group.
White young adults continue to obtain associate degrees or higher at a rate higher than Black young adults, although they also currently fall below their peer mean. Black young adults are increasing their degree attainment at a much higher rate than their white counterparts. In 2015, Blacks met their peer mean and are now one percentage point below it.
A greater number of young adult females hold at least an associate degree compared to young adult males. In 2015, men met their peer city mean, while women continued to fall below their peer city mean.
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.
