Methodology

Attainment

Percent of Arizona residents 25-64 years of age who have completed a 2- or 4-year degree or who have an active professional certificate or license.

Sources

Included in this number

Arizona residents aged 25-64 who have two-year, four-year, or advanced degrees from public or private institutions or who have an active professional certificate or license.

Alternatively, for county data and demographic subgroups, this measure includes only those with Associate’s degrees or higher as data for professional certificates or licenses are not available due to the limited sample size.

Not included in this number

Those who have never had post-high-school education, or have attended but earned neither a degree nor a non-degree certificate, are not included. Also excluded are people under age 25, many of whom are still working on their education. Those aged 65 and over, many of whom are retired, are also excluded. Those living in group quarters are excluded from poverty measures because their income is not calculated for the poverty statistic.

In brief

The Attainment goal contains two data elements: one for adults with at least an Associate’s degree, and another for adults who hold an active professional certificate or license.

For the first element, PUMS data for 2023 were filtered to include only persons aged 25 to 64. The Educational Attainment variable was collapsed from 24 categories down to two, those with at least an Associate’s degree and those without. The percentage of those with at least an Associate’s degree was then calculated for the race/ethnicity categories, and status for English proficiency, poverty, and disability. Results that had excessive margins of error were removed from the final table.

There is no generally accepted local, state, or national data source that counts adults with non-academic professional credentials. Data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) were used to estimate certifications and licenses using an average of their 2023 monthly data for all 12 months. After selecting the Arizona population aged 25 to 64, those possessing academic degrees (Associate’s degree and above) were filtered from the data. This number was then added to the academic credential number obtained from the PUMS data.

Detailed methods

The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a survey of about 60,000 households conducted monthly by the Census Bureau on behalf of Bureau of Labor Statistics. Although this survey is primarily designed to track employment trends, it also collects data on demographics, educational attainment and more.

Data from the CPS was retrieved from https://cps.ipums.org/cps/, a service that aggregates and formats data from CPS. Variables downloaded included age, race, Hispanic status, educational attainment, the presence of professional certification, and county of residence. Because the CPS uses a much smaller sample than the American Community Survey that supplies the PUMS data, only a few counties in Arizona are identified in the data.

As with the PUMS data, the CPS data was filtered to leave only respondents aged 25-64. Non-academic attainment was determined by identifying those that possess an “active professional certification or license,” but who do not have an academic degree. This avoids double-counting those such as doctors that hold both an academic degree and a professional license.

Intentional thought was put into the validity of combining the PUMS and CPS datasets to produce a single number. It is possible to estimate both academic and non-academic attainment using the CPS data alone. However, two factors suggest that using PUMS data for the academic portion of the final number is preferable:

  1. Academic attainment is widely reported using PUMS data in many other publications from a variety of sources. Using PUMS data for the academic portion of attainment allows comparability with these other sources.
  2. The PUMS data is drawn from a sample that is three times larger than that for the CPS, making it more accurate.

There was a remaining concern about combining these data, however. The academic attainment numbers derived from the PUMS data and the CPS data don’t quite match, which suggests there might be problems in combining the two sources. To resolve this conflict, estimated standard errors were calculated for the two academic attainment figures. This resolved the conflict by showing that there is no statistically significant difference between the two estimates. Since the PUMS estimate of academic attainment is more accurate due to its larger sample, it is the most appropriate source for that portion of the overall attainment number. The non-academic portion, derived from CPS, has less accuracy but is still the best currently available estimate.