As 55K Sunsets, Fight for Equity and Affordability in Postsecondary Education Continues
This post was published as an op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal on August 21, 2020. A decade ago, our community set an ambitious goal: by 2020, half of Louisville’s working-age adults would have a college degree. Although we didn’t achieve the goal, we can be proud that we’ve added more than 39,000 degrees in the […] Read More »
Partner Spotlight: Universal Woods CEO Paul Neumann on the benefits of employee higher ed and paying tuition up-front
Universal Woods President & CEO Paul Neumann was a little dubious when he saw data showing the portion of Louisville’s working population that had earned some college credits but never finished. “It said something like 25 percent of adults over 25 had some college education but had not completed a degree. I read that and […] Read More »
Some college, no degree: Getting Louisville’s adult learners across the finish line
It’s not always easy to finish what you start – especially when you’re picking up where you left off decades ago. That’s why it’s so inspiring to hear stories of Louisville adults who, years after leaving college, return to complete their degrees. Like the 45-year-old who wanted to finish not only for her own job […] Read More »
Focus on Student Success Gets Results at JCTC
When the 55K partnership set a goal to increase postsecondary degrees in Louisville, everyone at the table realized they had a part in the effort to get us there. For higher ed institutions, that meant acknowledging that they weren’t retaining or graduating enough of the students they enrolled – and getting to the root of […] Read More »
A look back and a look ahead: Lessons learned from an education movement
When our community started 55,000 Degrees in 2010, we knew it would take time to see changes in Louisville’s higher education attainment numbers. It would take institutional soul-searching, deep dives into data, relentless drive and multi-sector collaboration on a scale we hadn’t yet seen in our city. In short, we knew it wouldn’t be easy. […] Read More »
Reverse Degree program at UofL, Jefferson makes real impact in students’ lives
The war for talent is raging among mid-sized cities like Louisville. If we want to compete for the information-age jobs of the future – or at least not be left behind — we need the kind of skilled, educated workforce that grows an economy. Unfortunately, we aren’t quite there yet. While more than 65 percent of […] Read More »
The crisis of college affordability and how student voices can help
Yuderka, a student at Lehman College in the Bronx, stood before a national conference for education advocates I attended last month and recounted the financial hardships she’s faced in her college journey. The mother of two has been chipping away at a bachelor’s degree for years, working more than 35 hours a week, forgoing basics […] Read More »
Natural Breaks Algorithm
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
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.