Bachelors plus workforce is a key indicator of area economic development prospects in the modern economy. Just today, in fact the Census Bureau has issued a detailed report on the trends. So, again for African-American History Month, we go local, and take a look at educational attainment patterns over time for Black and other populations in the 10-county Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) region. For this analysis, we focus on higher education achievement, or on the shares of the populations 25 and over  that have attained a bachelors degree or more.  The prevalent perception has often been a snapshot view:  that Black shares of bachelors plus education lag those of other race and ethnic groups. And they do at present, as we show that in the maps below–though there are many areas with high Black shares of attainment. But what is much more rarely documented…and we do so in the charts below… is the dramatic increase (and superior rates of growth) in levels of Black higher educational attainment.

To start off,  2015-2019 census tract level American Community Survey (ACS) data clearly indicate that a relatively smaller number of tracts in our region (see the red shading in the color ramps of Map 1 and Map 2 ) have higher educational attainment for Blacks than visible for non-Hispanic Whites. For Blacks as well as for Whites, higher shares of persons 25+ with bachelors or more are found to the north of the region than seen to the south of the 10-county area. But as this blog has recently shown, there are far greater numbers of Whites to the north of the region, and more Blacks to the south. So the higher Black shares to the north (in Map 1) involve a smaller share of that total population.

The bar chart below uses time-series Social Explorer data as the basis to assess the trends of the past 50 years by decade. In each period ( as indicated by a ratio of over 1.0) the growth rate in the shares of Black higher educational attainment exceeded that of the Non-Black population. In the highest relative decade of Black population growth (the 2000s), the ratio was over 3.5, and in three of the other five periods, approached 2.0 (twice the Non-Black growth) . Only in the 1980s, the top period for relative Non-Black population growth in the region, did the Black bachelor’s plus population share increase by less than twice that of the comparable Non-Black group.

Distilling the data over the last half-century yields this summation: the share of Blacks with a bachelor’s degree or more has increased nearly 5 times (498%) , while the Non-Black 25+ populations’ share of bachelor’s degrees or more has grown 3.5 times (strong growth, yet less dramatic).

Charts 2 and 3 below illustrate the dramatic increase in higher-educated Blacks from 1980 to 2000 to 2019.

As of 2019, Chart 2 shows that 40 percent or more of the county black population had a bachelors or more, and 33 percent of the 10-county area did. In 1980, only 12 percent of the Black population region-wide had a bachelors or more and in four counties, less than five percent of the Black population had reached that level. In all but one county (Fayette, with a very low Black population) the shares of Black bachelors-plus attainment increased each twenty-year period. Clayton County had the lowest share of Black population with a bachelors plus in 2019 (at 20%) but the highest share in 1980 (14%)

Chart 3 looks at just 1970 and 2019 alone, showing the growth in both overall and in higher-educated Black population. Henry had the highest share of Black population in 1970, but Clayton had the highest by far by 2019. In 1970,  in only two of the ten counties (Fulton and Henry) did the Black population comprise more than 15 percent of all persons having a bachelors plus, and the regional share was about 1 in 12 . By 2019, up to almost  3 in 10 of  all the region’s bachelors plus population were Black, and in only Cherokee, Cobb, and Fayette were fewer than 1 in 5 bachelors plus attainers Black.