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In October, the U.S. Census Bureau released a report detailing why it planned to release the results of the 2020 American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year estimates in an experimental format. The ACS is the only annually updated source of detailed social, demographic, and economic information for all communities in the United States. In addition, the Bureau announced in November that it would delay the release of the 5-Year ACS estimates that had been planned for…
Picture this: You’re at a demography dinner party. (Let’s pretend we can have dinner parties again.) And the demography enthusiast next to you says, “Hey! Got a question for you. Which county in North Carolina is most like the state?” How would you answer? First, you’d want to know what parameters to include – e.g. what factors to consider in thinking through how to calculate your answer. To do that, we can start with an…
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. In 1990 President George H. W. Bush signed into law a joint resolution designating November as the first National American Indian Heritage Month. That year’s U.S. Census identified 1.96 million people classified as…
28 million kids are now eligible to receive their Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines now that the shots are approved for 5 to 11-year-olds, according to the AP. We wanted to see how many kids in NC fall in this age group and determine where they live. Using the 2021 single age population projection data from the North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management (OSBM), we calculated the number of individuals aged 5 through 11 by county…
Redistricting may be foreign to many citizens, but it plays an important role in the outcome of elections and the legislature that has an effect on our everyday lives. Redistricting is when state legislatures look at the state map and redraw the lines for congressional districts. These districts determine who will be elected for those districts and what type of representation the citizens living in those districts will be receiving over the course of their…
This piece will be updated throughout the week as more questions come in. If you have a question about redistricting (or are a journalist writing a piece) please email demography@unc.edu and we'll do our best to answer your question. We have been receiving a lot of questions concerning redistricting and the upcoming release of the redrawn maps in North Carolina. We’ve talked about redistricting a lot, including what it is, why it’s complicated, and what…
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…
North Carolina’s Hispanic population is now greater than one million people, with 1,118,596 residents according to the 2020 Census. The state’s Hispanic/Latino population grew from just over 75,000 in 1990 to 800,000 in 2010. Between 2010 and 2020, North Carolina’s Hispanic population grew by nearly 320,000 new residents, the largest numeric increase of any racial/ethnic group in the state. Statewide, the Latinx population grew by 40% over the decade, faster than the growth of this…
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…
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