High School Attainment: Five Years and Five Decade Change

Here's a quick look at rising Kentucky educational attainment, using data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

Census data will include private school and home school diplomas, along with equivalency degrees, so this chart can never be a straightforward match to our reported cohort graduation rates.

Still, this is a clear indication that our state is making sustained progress on high school attainment.

It's also worth pausing to trace the evidence of a huge educational change decades ago. 

You can see the difference if you compare Kentuckians 65 and older to any other cohort, and notice how much lower their completion rates were. 

You can see the shift even more sharply if you look at how that age group changed from 2008 to 2013. That's the transition from the youngest members of the group being in 1943 to the youngest being born in 1948, and roughly from 1961 eligibility for high school graduation to 1966 eligibility –and moving through those years has quickly given Kentucky a dramatically better educated group of older citizens.