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Overview

The educational status of the population is one of the strongest predictors of the quality of life in the community. Educational indicators measure important conditions of students that are likely to influence academic achievement over time. These indicators include educational attainment, school enrollment, classroom environment, graduation, and college and career readiness.

Educational Attainment: The highest degree or the highest level of education completed by persons at least 25 years of age.
School Enrollment: Three- and four-year-old population enrolled in school.
Student-Teacher Ratio: Students per one teacher in core subjects: English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies.
Teacher Salary: Average teacher salary.
Teacher Status: Teachers returning to teach from previous year and inexperienced teachers teaching in core classes.
Students in Poverty: Students living in poverty (homeless or migrant, Medicaid enrollment, SNAP enrollment, TANF enrollment, and foster care involvement).
On-Time Graduation: Four-year cohort graduation rates.
School Dropout and Recovery: Annual rate of students who leave the school and the proportion of students who have dropped out, reenrolled in school.
Career Readiness Assessment: Students taking career readiness assessment and earning Ready to Work (R2W) certificates.
SAT Proficiency: Average composite SAT scores and percent of students taking the SAT test.
ACT Proficiency: Average composite ACT scores and percent of students meeting ACT benchmarks.

The educational status of the population is one of the strongest predictors of the quality of life in the community. Educational indicators can be used to ensure that schools meet determined standards and to monitor the students’ performance. These will help identify problems and issues which lead to the system’s improvement. Also, lack of education is closely linked to poverty. Understanding differences in education levels can highlight whether certain people might be disproportionately impacted by policies, plans, and management actions, and can inform communication and outreach efforts.

The data and analysis that are featured on “Education” use first-party data, where possible, in order to minimize potential variations between data points, and to offer more reliable comparison across counties. The data sources are from U.S. Census Bureau and S.C. Department of Education.

Complete definitions for terms and data sources that are used for Education can be found in Glossary of Terms and Data Sources pages.