Another Reason to Hire Copy Editors

The Chamber of Commerce of my county released their annual "hey, move your business here" magazine the other day, and the very first non-advertisement page has a section of demographics. One of the statistics cited:

"31% of adults over the age of 25 are high school graduates" -- when I read that, I nearly spewed my tea across the room. Only 31%? How can that be? You mean that most of the people I meet off-campus every day are high school dropouts? I e-mailed the Chamber for clarification, but got no response.

I finally got sick of waiting, and checked the US Census Bureau data, which said instead that 69% were high school graduates, meaning that 31 % are not high school graduates. Now, while I think this is still not a statistic to be proud of (the national average is just over 80%), it's way better than they advertised.

Incidentally, the Census Bureau also says that in this county 18.4% have a Bachelor's degree or higher, with that figure jumping up to 20.9% for those 25-34 years old -- figures that are a bit low for the national average (which is about 25%), but seem pretty high considering the high dropout rate. Since the figure is actually higher for 25-34 years old (i.e. younger than the Troy University faculty) it seems that educational attainment is rising to the national average. In other words, most of the people I meet off-campus are either high school dropouts or college graduates, with little middle ground.

Still, way better than the 31% graduation rate error in the magazine. It's time to add a copy editor to the staff.