Graduate and professional education can open greater opportunities for Louisvillians in the city’s educational and employment systems. Achieving a graduate or professional degree can positively impact an individual’s overall ability to thrive in their community, and growing up with caregivers who have achieved graduate or professional degrees increases a child’s likelihood to pursue secondary education.
Louisville currently ranks 8th among its peer cities with 14.4% of working age individuals having earned a graduate or professional 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 nearly 14% of working age 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 working age adults have post-baccalaureate degrees are purple, while areas where fewer working age 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 Southeast Louisville where over 42% of the working age adult population have a graduate or professional degree. Conversely, the lowest concentration of earned post-baccalaureate degrees can be seen in the Portland, Russell and South Louisville neighborhoods, where less than 1% of working age 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.
Since 2000, Louisville continues to outpace the peer mean in the rate of graduate degree attainment. After topping the 75th percentile in 2014, the city fell back towards the peer mean in 2016 and currently sits at 13.6%. This is 0.3 percentage points above the peer mean.
Working adults in Louisville and the most improved city, St. Louis, have obtained graduate degrees at a rate higher than the peer mean. Louisville has trailed behind. St. Louis since the year 2000. Currently, 13.6% of working adults in Louisville have a graduate degree. This is decrease from a high in 2014. Indianapolis, the least improved city has trailed behind the peer mean since 2000.
Since the year 2000, Louisville has made no improvement narrowing the gap between white and Black graduate degree attainment. Both groups are currently below their respective peer means. Blacks in Louisville are currently further below their peer mean and whites in Louisville.
Since the year 2008, the gap between females and males in Louisville increased, overall. Currently, females in Louisville stand at 14.9%, above their peer mean, while males in Louisville stand 12.3%, slightly below their peer 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.
