According to this statistic, Percentage of persons 25 to 29 years old with selected levels of educational attainment, by race/ethnicity and sex: Selected years, 1920 through 2013, only 40% of people between the ages of 25 and 29 have Bachelor’s Degrees. However, it’s difficult for me just to find a 23 year old that doesn’t have one. I know my social circle may be bias, but that’s not the only contradictory source. I’ll look up random strangers facebook, and they’ve all had one since before they turned 23 or are in process of doing so if under 23. And it’s not just facebook. I’ll go to online dating sites, and anyone I look up, of either gender, has had, or will have, a Bachelor’s Degree before turning 23. And it’s the same thing with twitter, Linkedin, youtube, or any other form of social media that I use. What’s going on?
And what did you find when you expanded your survey to include people who have no internet access?
You go to FB or Twitterland and actually believe the profiles ?
I think you have a biased sampling in order to draw any conclusions from. Pick 10,000 appropriate age people randomly out of the phone book from a very large area and see what that tells you. And that may be somewhat biased since the homeless don’t have phones or addresses, and many of them don’t have bachelors degrees.
Are you including the people from 18-23 who are in prison, mental instutions, homeless, or don’t have internet access at home? Picking people who you know and who are close to you on social media sites is a really biased sample.
You’re not even reading your own cite properly; it’s 33.6%. Non-white people matter too:(
Did I say otherwise? I’ll answer that for you. No.
It’s also not the only biased source. All the social media you list skew towards middle-class more-likely-to-be-educated people. How many construction workers do you know? How many do you see on Facebook? How many hairdressers do you know? How many are on dating sites? How many oil riggers do you know? How many use Twitter? How many truck drivers do you know? How many are on LinkedIn?
Your world, including the internet-enabled part of it, is not a representative sample of the world at large.
This is from your OP:
33.6% =/= 40%. It’s less. You find it hard to believe that only 40% of people in this age group have college degrees, but actually less do.
As a few others said, your experiences are likely not from a truly random sample. If you live in a city or suburban area, more people are going to be educated. If you have a certain type of job, more people you know are going to be educated. If you’re in a middle-class or up neighborhood, more people are going to be educated. Even if you check social media, that’s going to skew more toward people higher on the socioeconomic ladder, and more of them are going to be educated.
Consider how many people you know that have blue collar jobs, are poor, live in rural areas, whose families have a history of being uneducated, etc. I can definitely say that of the people I know, a lot more than 40% have a college education, but I also realize that my sample is definitely skewed. So, frankly, I wouldn’t think much of it unless your sample really seems like it really is close to random or even possibly selected from groups that might be less likely.
Even assuming that the people on Facebook and dating sites are not trying to lie about having a bachelor’s degree - the only thing I see on Facebook profiles is Name of College , class of year. I know people who left college before getting a degree who list their college and the year they should have graduated, or where the year denotes the year they received an associate degree. I even know people who never went to college who have a college listed on their Facebook profile and people often join groups such as “College class of 81” to find high school friends who would have been in that class. Facebook profiles absolutely never say something like “name of college, received BS at age 22”. Do dating sites list the degree and the year it was granted?
BTW, be careful, too about making other assumptions. I'm sure lots of my family believes my son has a bachelor's degree. After all, I have one, my daughter has a master's and he went to college when he finished high school . But he stopped at an associate's degree.I’m the OP. I get that where I’m looking may still be biased. However, that doesn’t explain how most of the people I encounter got it before they were 23. On another site that I can’t find the link to, only 40% of people who enter college graduate in 4 years. This means that even of the people who do get Bachelor’s Degrees, most of them should not have had one before 23.
The table doesn’t say that people didn’t get their degree until the age of 25 to 29. That just happens to be the age group selected for the survey. If you got your degree when you’re 23 (or whatever) then you will still have it when you’re in the 25 to 29 are group.
It does not necessarily mean that. If, for instance, 50% of those who enter graduate in five years, then along with the 40% who graduated in four years there are 90% who have degrees before age 23 (assuming typical ages and going straight from high school to college).
On another tack, if 50% of those who entered dropped out, then that would mean 80% of graduates did it in four years. I know that’s not what happens, but it illustrates that the statistic you mention, by itself, does not support the conclusion you want to draw.
Again, what you observe from the people YOU know isn’t likely to parallel what’s going on in the country (or world) as a whole. Sounds like your horizons have tons of room for expansion.
Since the OP is asking about his personal experience, let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Very important lesson for you here.
If your sample size is small but representative you’ll probably get a rough but broadly accurate result.
If it is massive but biased it will definitely give you a wonderfully precise but very wrong answer.
Look online for sites that provide demographics for cities, counties, or other areas. They’re out there.
Here’s a business app for the Stockton area. Warning, it’s use is not intuitive. http://www.advantagestockton.com/
Selecting an area that looks like a four mile radius, centered on downtown (and extending to the east, south, and west of the city limits by a good bit), you get:
Education attainment for population age 25+:
<Grade 9 - - - 20.43
Grades 9-12 - - - 17.09
Graduated High School - - - 21.12
Some College - - - 18.35
Associates Degree - - - 7.03
Bachelors Degree - - - 8.06
Graduate Degree - - - 7.92
That’s nearly 16% with a bachelors. Try it in your area. That’s your area, not your neighborhood.
If you plug in Palo Alto or Cupertino into such a site you are going to get a very different result. Both are correct for their areas, but not much is evenly distributed across the country.
The OP should read up on sampling theory. I suspect the sample he has taken is quite small, and he’ll get a huge sampling error aside from the bias errors already discussed.
According to my experience, the number is lower. Arkansas.
71% of the surface of the earth is covered by water, but if you only look for it in the 33% of land area that is arid desert then your experience will not match.