Quad City Times, IA
08-15-06
Survey: More college grads in Q-C
By Ed Tibbetts
It never occurred to Lindsay Crane that she wouldn’t go to college. Her parents
did. Her friends did. “It was just something I always figured I’d do,” the 23-yearold nurse from Davenport said. She had plenty of company, especially in the first
half of this decade.
Between 2000 and 2005, the number of Quad-Citians with four-year degrees
leaped from 32,133 to at least 39,212.
People with graduate or other professional degrees, meanwhile, spiked to 21,173
from 15,522.
A chunk of that increase was the government’s addition of Mercer County, and its
approximately 1,500 degree-holding residents, to the Quad-City metropolitan
area.
But the rest is a noticeable increase in college-educated people in a metro area
whose population has barely changed since 2000, according to a new
government survey released today.
“This is good for the Quad-Cities,” says Marti Clyde, director of the Quad-Cities
Graduate Studies Center.
The government report, called the American Community Survey, details an array
of demographic and social trends in communities across the country with
populations of 65,000 or more.
Usually, this kind of information is available once a decade, but the U.S. Census
Bureau is in the midst of revamping its practices.
In two weeks, it will release income and poverty data.
Because the latest survey went only to people living in households — and not in
group quarters, such as nursing homes, college dorms and prisons — it’s difficult
to measure the change since the 2000 Census.
The 2000 Census included the 2 percent of the population living in those group
quarters. Still, it’s clear the percentage with four-year degrees has grown.
In 2000, 20.3 percent of the area’s population over 25 years of age had at least a
four-year degree.
In 2005, according to the new survey, it was 24.6 percent. The margin of error in
the Quad-City survey is plus or minus 1.3 percentage points.
Statewide, the ratio was 23.8 percent last year, up from 21.2 percent in 2000.
Most of the increase is occurring in metro areas, says Dave Swenson, a
researcher at Iowa State University.
Educators in the Quad-Cities say they’ve seen the change.
Graduating classes at St. Ambrose University have increased 7 percent to 8
percent annually the past five years, said Jamie Loftus, vice president for
enrollment and student services.
Many of those gradudates are traditional students who went straight from high
school to college, but many are adults seeking to boost their careers by getting
an advanced degree.
Many, too, are women, like Crane, an emergency room nurse at Genesis Medical
Center. “I like it because it’s always something different,” she says.
The government figures show most of the growth in the college-educated
population in the Quad-Cities was driven by women.
Economic development officials say a better educated work force will help attract
jobs, although government figures state that in the first four years of the decade
the employment sectors where college graduates are most in demand grew
slowly here, if at all.
What is happening in many cases is that employers are demanding, and in some
cases giving incentives, so their workers seek greater educational skills.
“We’re educating our work force as we go,” said Ranay Robison-Scheer, senior
vice president for economic development at DavenportOne.
The spike in interest in college degrees can be seen at the Grad Center, a
partnership of 10 universities in Iowa and Illinois.
There, about 5,000 people took courses in the 2005-6 school year, up from 4,210
five years ago.
“There are more people in college than ever before,” Loftus, of St. Ambrose,
said.
He warns, however, that demographic trends point to fewer high school
graduates in the future, and that could mean lower numbers of college graduates
down the road.
Ed Tibbetts can be contacted at (563) 383-2327 or etibbetts@qctimes.com.
Survey findings
Here are more findings, the American Community Survey reported:
* The number of foreign-born people entering the Quad-Cities over the past five
years was 2,528, with 1,733 settling in Rock Island County and about 700 in
Scott County.
The total foreign-born population in Quad-City households is 12,638.
* About half the area’s households were occupied by married couples. A fifth
were married couples with children.
* The median age in the Quad-Cities household population was 38.9, about the
same as the rest of Iowa and 2.5 years higher than the median age nationwide.
* The percentage of the Quad-Cities household population over 65 years old was
about 14 percent, about two percentage points higher than the country and the
same as the state of Iowa.
* The percentage of Hispanics in the area’s household population is 6.3 percent.
It’s 3.7 percent across Iowa.
* About 6.6 percent of the area’s household population is African-American; it is
2.7 percent in Iowa.