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 8th among its peer cities with 13.5% of young adults having earned a post-baccalaureate degree.
Louisville is in the middle 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 thirteen percent of young adults hold graduate or professional degrees in Louisville, the prevalence of degrees varies substantially across the city. In the map to the left, areas where more young adults have post-baccalaureate degrees are purple, while areas where fewer young adults hold post-baccalaureate degrees are blue and white. Similar to other maps of post-secondary degrees, there is a distinct divide between western and eastern Louisville.
Post-baccalaureate educational achievement is most concentrated the Highlands where over 31% of the young adult population have a graduate or professional degree. Conversely, the lowest concentration of earned post-baccalaureate degrees can be seen in the Portland neighborhood, where approximately 0% of young adults have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Scroll over the map to see values for each census tract. Zoom in to see street names that form that boundaries of each tract.
The rate of graduate degree attainment in Louisville has fallen since 2013. It now lies below the 75th percentile at 13.5%, one percentage point below that percentile. The city has performed above the peer mean since the year 2000.
Since 2010, Louisville has outpaced the peer mean and the most improved city, Omaha. Currently, 13.5% of young adults in Louisville have a graduate degree. Greensboro is the least improved city.
The gap between Blacks and whites has increased since the year 2000. Whites in Louisville are performing above their peer mean at 15.7%, while Blacks in Louisville are performing under their peer mean at just 5.5%.
The gap between young adult females and males has widened since 2011. Both young adult females and males in Louisville are outpacing their respective peer means. The rate for graduate degree attainment for females in Louisville stands at 15.7%. The rate for males in Louisville stands at 11.2%.
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.
