Earning a college degree opens many doors that lead to better career opportunities and higher earnings. Additionally, children are more likely to earn a secondary degree of their own when their parents have attended college. An educated workforce is important to establishing 21st-century jobs to make Louisville competitive in the modern economy.
Louisville currently ranks 11th among its peer cities with 45.5% of working age individuals 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.
Although many working adults in Louisville have an associate degree or higher, there is a clear geographic divide on where those people live. In the map to the left, areas where more adults have post-secondary degrees are purple. Areas where fewer adults hold post-secondary degrees are white.
High attainment of a post-secondary degrees is almost exclusively seen in east of I-65, among communities such as Northeast Jefferson, J-Town, and the Highlands. In these areas, percentages are over 80%. In comparison, there is a lower percentage of working adults with associate degrees or higher in western Louisville, with several areas showing less than 15%.
Scroll over the map to see values for each census tract. Zoom in to see street names that form the boundaries of each tract.
With the exception of the year 2014, Louisville has fallen below the peer mean for the percentage of adults ages 25-64 with an associate degree or higher. The city has experienced a decrease in the number of these degrees since 2014.
In 2013, Louisville began to outpace the least improved city, Tulsa. Louisville is currently the most improved city in its peer group. However, the city still remains below the peer mean at 43.5%
Both white and Black Louisvillians are performing below their respective peer city means. Whites have consistently performed below their 25th percentiles. After decreasing from 2011, Blacks are rebounding and are almost near their 25th percentile.
Women of working age are outpacing men in the attainment of associate degrees or higher. Both men and women continue to perform below their respective peer city means.
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.
