How does your education affect your life?
I wanted to look into a census data set and see how different education levels affect different aspects of people’s lives. I first wanted to use the baseline of what the classic “Nuclear Family” is. The nuclear family lives in a home and has at least two and a half kids on average. The classic nuclear family was educated somewhere between highschool and a bachelor’s degree. The classic ideal of the family is also going to be living above poverty in the United States. The poverty line nationally is $35,000(source). First we have to start by looking at what education levels work the most or least on average.
By looking at the data surrounding the average hours worked by each education level it is easy to see that there is not a great variation in the amount of hours that different education levels work each week. It is almost a linear relationship between perceived education level and average hours worked in a week. From this we can see that regardless of what job you java you’re going to be working a lot.
I next wanted to see what the most common living situations are in the United States. A majority of people live in houses, apartments, and flats. This data makes it much more difficult to see who has achieved the status of homeowner. But, removing the data surrounding houses, apartments, and flats we can find more out about what is going on with people’s living situations.
Outside of people living in homes, apartments, and flats, the most common places for people to live are mobile homes. Living in a mobile home pretty much directly correlates to having lesser education.
The above graph shows the relationship between which education level has whichever number of jobs are most occupied at that level. It is very interesting to see that the distribution of self employment and private nonprofit work are the highest amongst every education level. The relative amount of each is also similar across every level. These jobs are then separated by primarily for profit workers. That is, until you reach the bottom of the bars where you see that government jobs agree the least likely to be occupied, probably meaning there’s less of them and they probably don’t pay as well.
The above graph shows how many families have each number of people in them. This shows that educated people are more likely to have families. It also means that people with only high school degrees are having more families than any other groups combined. It is interesting too that there are less higher educated people having families than any other group. This could be because, as we saw earlier, these people are the most busy with their work. They are the least likely to have time for a family.
Lastly we can look at the distribution of how many people are making certain amounts of money. Looking at people with less than high school to some college level of education you can see that a majority of people are making $20,000 — $24,999. This puts most people without any post high school degree below the poverty line in the United States. Once you reach people with associate’s degrees and higher they are most frequently making $75,000 — $99,999. This puts those people comfortable above the poverty line. With this many people on either side of the poverty line it puts around 50% of them below from just a glance. The poverty line for a family of the same size in 1982 was less than one third the value (source). In 1983 the average salivary was $15,239 which means that well over 50% of the population was making enough money to live really comfortable lives. We now live in a world where comfort takes a lot more effort. By looking at the graphs above you can see that it is becoming harder for people to become wealthy. It takes more effort to live that nuclear family american dream. But, at the end of the day it isn’t for everyone. Maybe people are happier with the way things have shifted. Maybe not everybody needs to be living so much higher than the standard.
