Education
Keep up with our latest demographic insights
Across the country, fewer students are showing up in traditional public schools because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We have looked at attendance data from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to understand how declines in enrollment vary across the state and which grades are impacted. How much is school attendance down? Statewide, nearly 63,000 fewer students were attending public schools in Month 2 of 2020-21 compared to 2019-20, a loss of -4.4%. Public school enrollments had been slowly declining since 2015-16, reflecting two factors
We recently worked with the Chamber for a Greater Chapel Hill-Carrboro, the governments of the Towns of Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough, and Orange County to streamline existing processes for acquiring, updating, and maintaining the data they use for their community reports and presentations. As part of that work, we've released a series of reports looking at demographic and economic trends in Orange County, NC. Here are some highlights from Carolina Demography's report on community…
Current FAFSA Completion in North Carolina Research has established a strong relationship between high school seniors completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and their likelihood to attend college. FAFSA completion is also a key transition point along the educational continuum. An analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that 88% of high school seniors who completed a FAFSA in 2012-13 had attended college by February 2016, compared to…
Adaeze Ibeanu is a rising sophomore at UNC double majoring in Psychology and Political Science. She recently started interning with Carolina Demography, where she has been monitoring legislative committee meetings that address education in North Carolina. She will continue this work when the General Assembly convenes for the long session in January. Most recently, she has researched and written a blog post about Cooperative Innovative High Schools in NC – one of which she attended…
Since office and school closures began in response to the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this year, remote workers and students across the state have been feeling the effects of decreased network speed and sputtering performance on their home networks, leading some to question whether their home internet service is up to the task of keeping them connected with remote co-workers, classmates, and professors. It has even led some policy makers to question if now is the time to reconsider whether high-speed internet should continue to be viewed as a high-tech luxury, or simply a necessity of modern life.
This blog is the second in a series exploring myFutureNC’s statewide dashboard indicators, which span the educational continuum. Read the complete series. This week, we’ll be going in depth on two similar indicators - College-and-Career-Ready in reading and math. Although we provide detailed information on NC, national data on the percent of 3-8 grade students who earned college-and-career-ready scores on End-of-Grade (EOG) reading and math exams are not available, and therefore we cannot compare North Carolina to other states. What…
This blog post is the first in a series exploring myFuture NC’s statewide dashboard indicators, which span the educational continuum. For week 1, we’ll be going in depth on NC Prekindergarten (NC Pre-K) enrollment. Although we provide detailed information on NC, data on enrollment in Pre-K is not available nationally, and therefore we cannot compare NC’s enrollment rates to other states. What is NC Pre-K? Research has established that the first several years of a…
In February, we partnered with myFutureNC to launch a statewide attainment dashboard to serve as a shared, nonpartisan source of information about the state of education in North Carolina. The dashboard tracks proven indicators along the education continuum, capturing key transition points for students from NC Pre-K enrollment through degree or credential completion and into the labor market. On the dashboard, you’ll find a simple, visual way to learn more about individual indicators, including how…
A report published last month by the National Center for Homeless Education at UNC-Greensboro indicated that the population of homeless students enrolled in public school districts has increased 15 percent in the last three years and now numbers 1,508,265 youth, the highest in more than a decade. In North Carolina, there are an estimated 26,361 public school students who experienced homelessness over the course of the 2016-17 school year, according to the United States Interagency…
We partnered with myFutureNC to launch a statewide attainment dashboard to serve as a shared, nonpartisan source of information about the state of education in North Carolina. The dashboard tracks proven indicators along the education continuum, capturing key transition points for students from NC Pre-K enrollment through degree or credential completion and into the labor market. On the dashboard, you’ll find a simple, visual way to learn more about individual indicators, including how we calculated…
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