Education
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Dr. Michael Cline is the state demographer for North Carolina at the Office of State Budget and Management and has given us permission to re-post his content here. Each year, he publishes population estimates and projections for North Carolina and its counties. It’s a time of excitement for thousands of 5-year-olds (and their parents) in North Carolina. As a new school year begins, many of these children will start kindergarten. According to current OSBM projections,…
As part of our work on the county attainment profiles with myFutureNC, we regularly identify new data sources and metrics that help answer questions we are hearing from local stakeholders. For example, we developed county-level opportunity youth metrics to provide county leaders information on how 16-24-year-olds in their communities are doing with respect to work and school. We used this same methodological approach to develop another new county indicator: the share of children who would…
Today we are launching a new tool with myFutureNC—the myFutureNC Attainment Trends Workbook—to help you understand trends in educational indicators at the state- and county-level. This tool draws from state and federal sources to highlight trends in three attainment-relevant areas: Academic Readiness, including NC Pre-K participation, College- and Career-Ready in Math and Reading, Advanced Placement and College & Career Promise participation, chronic absenteeism, and high school graduation; College & Career Access, including ACT performance, FAFSA…
Today we are launching a new tool with myFutureNC to help you visualize educational indicators at the county-level. The County Explorer map tool provides a bird's eye view of county performance and uses data from the 2020 County Profiles. To use the County Explorer tool, select an indicator from the drop-down menu in the left sidebar. Information about the county will be displayed in the right side bar, along with a link to the corresponding…
Our recently published guide on Opportunity Youth explains why we replaced the Disconnected Youth indicator on the MyFutureNC state dashboard with the Opportunity Youth indicator and expanded the ages we were studying for this indicator from 16 to 19-year-olds to 16 to 24-year-olds. We always try to provide data at both the state and county levels. However, one of the challenges in transitioning to the Opportunity Youth indicator is the lack of data at the…
The application cycle for the 2022-23 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) cycle began on October 1, 2021 and runs through 11:59 p.m. Central time (CT) on June 30, 2023. Students are strongly recommended to fill out the form as soon as possible after October 1 because awards are made until funds are depleted. Federal Student Aid, an office of the U.S. Department of Education, provides more than $150 billion in financial aid each…
The population of homeless students enrolled in public school districts nationwide decreased 4% between the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years, according to The National Center for Homeless Education (NCHE) at UNC-Greensboro, which recently released their annual look at children experiencing homelessness and attending public school. Nationally, there were 1,384,301 homeless youth enrolled in public school in the 2018-19 school year. However, things looked very different in North Carolina. In 2017-18, there were an estimated 28,903…
When the myFutureNC state dashboard launched in February 2020, we tracked an indicator called “disconnected youth,” which we defined as the percent of North Carolina’s 16-19-year-olds who were neither in school or working full or part time. The definition focused on the 16-19 age range because that was the age range used by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey in their subject table. (Specifically, we were looking at the 5-Year ACS in Table B14005:…
The pandemic has increased the rate of homeschooling substantially, both nationally and at the state level. In North Carolina, the number of home schooled students increased by 21% from 2019-20 (149,173 students) to 2020-21 (179,900 students). In this blog post, we take a closer look at North Carolina’s data to see how the percentage increase of homeschooled students varies across counties. All 100 counties across North Carolina saw increase in homeschooled students Data provided from…
A growing number of Americans are teaching their children at home. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of homeschooled students nearly doubled nationally from 850,000 in 1999 to 1,690,000 in 2016. The percentage of students who were homeschooled increased from 1.7 percent of all students to 3.3 percent of all students over the same time. The pandemic has dramatically increased the number of homeschooled students nationally. The U.S. Census Bureau created…
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