Source: Census Bureau

Tools: Datawrapper, Illustrator

Interactive chart here

Ideally, post-graduate and post-secondary education would be separate categories. It would help provide more context to education attainment. For example, a big chunk of people in DC have a master's degree.

Very cool. Presume this reflects people currently living in these states not which states produce people who reach the highest level of education? Because, people move around. For example, everyone currently living in DC wasn’t born, raised, or educated there. But by contrast I’m guessing most people don’t stay in WV.

Interesting data and nice design, but the order of the legend annoys me 😅

Holy cow, it’s almost a voting key, too.

You should put percentage points within each color of each bar. Not very useful but pretty I guess

It literally IS a voting key (maybe with NM and UT) switched.

I would like to see this crossed with Red vs Blue States.

Does this encompass all ages or only adults/18+?

This also needs labels on the right side. And it's interesting how TX, CA, & NY have so many high school dropouts relative to the in-graph neighbouring states.

[removed]

Mississippi isn't last!!

These data would be more beautiful (especially for folks with color vision deficits, like me) if the categories in the legend were in the same order as the bar segments in the chart.

I was going to suggest a red/blue overlay

I’d like to see it ordered in reverse

It's interesting to see a large "less than high school" group and a large "Bachelor Degree or higher group (like California and Texas). Wonder what is going on there.

It’s going to tell you exactly what you think it’s going to tell you.

It would be interesting to see a visualization of where people are from and where they were located at Census. It won't show brain drains if at the state level, but could add some nuance. My guess is that it would just make smaller, conservative states look bad though

I would arrange the order of the colors by education level, lowest to highest or highest to lowest, and add a category for post-graduate degrees. Also have the order in the key be the same as the graph.