Sources

• Arizona Board of Regents, Arizona Department of Education and National Center for Education Statistics (2021)
• National Student Clearinghouse via Arizona Board of Regents, 2005-2020
• National Center for Education Statistics, 2018-19

Included in this number

Arizona district and charter high school students who graduated in 2020-2021 school year and enrolled in post-secondary education during the 2021-2022 school year. Post-secondary enrollment includes in-state and out-of-state universities, community colleges, or private postsecondary trade schools.

Not included in this number

Students who graduated in the 2020-2021 school year but have enrolled in the 2022-2023 school year or in a subsequent year.

Students not included in calculations:

• Municipal:
  • A total of 230 High School graduates statewide came from schools that could not be placed in any one municipality but are included in the county and state numbers
  • 83 High School graduates could not be identified as belonging to any specific school and were thereby not placed in any one municipality
  • A total of five municipalities statewide had five or fewer high school graduates so numbers are not included to protect the privacy of those students
• County
  • 83 High School Graduates could not be identified as belonging to any specific school and were thereby not placed in any one county but are included in state numbers

In Brief

The Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) website includes a list of high schools in Arizona along with the number of graduates and the number who enroll in post-secondary education the following year. High school graduation data for the 2020-2021 school year is sent by the Arizona Department of Education to the National Student Clearinghouse, which matches individual student information with enrollment in universities, community colleges, and trade schools for the 2021-2022 school year. The National Student Clearinghouse returns the file to ADE and it is shared with ABOR, which process the data file to produce their report.

Detailed Methodology

The ABOR report is compiled using high school graduation data from ADE and postsecondary enrollment figures from the National Student Clearinghouse. This report lists school names, school identification codes, raw graduation data, and post-secondary enrollment records. Please see the section ‘School Geography’ for information on how geographies were determined for each school.

School Geography

To provide data to municipalities on local education conditions and trends, data that is usually released at the school or district level was converted to county and municipal level data. This process provides a picture of how the district and charter schools in an area are performing.

In Arizona, school district boundaries do not necessarily follow city and town boundaries and charter schools are free to locate wherever they please. Additionally, Arizona is an open-enrollment state, meaning that students can enroll in a school that is in a different town from where they reside, and there are an increasing number of online ‘virtual’ schools that may have an office in a certain city, but the students have no particular connection to the city. A final complication is that a school’s street address does not necessarily conform to the physical city in which it resides. For example, Marana High School is located within the Marana town limits. However, it has a Tucson street address even though the Tucson city limits are over 10 miles distant.

To resolve these conflicts, a shapefile containing the geography of Arizona municipalities was downloaded from the US Census Bureau was imported into ArcGIS. This file contains the boundaries of incorporated cities and towns, as well as Census Designated Places (CDP), which are recognized unincorporated population centers such as Sun City and Mayer.

From the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) the following was downloaded:

• The name of all district and charter school in Arizona.
• Latitude and Longitude for each school location.
• Location address of each school.
• Unique State ID number for each school.
• A flag indicating whether or not the school is a ‘virtual school.’

The latitude and longitude was used to map all schools in ArcGIS, and a spatial join was performed with the Census Bureau shapefile to determine the city, town, or CDP that each school is located in.

Schools that NCES identified as virtual schools were labeled as such and not assigned to any municipality.

Schools located on unincorporated county land and not in a CDP were individually examined, and assigned to a municipality based on the proximity of the school and district to neighboring areas.

Schools that were remote from population centers as defined by the Census Bureau are listed as “unallocated.”