These Attainment Profiles were created by myFutureNC and Carolina Demography to highlight educational attainment and key education and workforce performance metrics at the county level and select regional levels such as Prosperity Zones, Workforce Development Boards, and Councils of Governments.
The myFutureNC Attainment Profiles are updated annually in February with occasional updates occurring throughout the year.
Because the number of charter schools varies substantially across counties, and every county does not have a charter school, the 100 County Profiles and our regional profiles only include K-12 outcomes for students in traditional school districts or Local Education Agencies (LEAs). We provide separate Charter School Profiles at the state level and for select Prosperity Zones that have 5 or more charter high schools.
County leaders can use these profiles to help facilitate conversations and decision-making on local priorities aimed at increasing education levels. Each County Attainment Profile contains specific “opportunities for growth” uniquely identified for your county. If you’d like to learn more, please reach out to your myFutureNC Regional Impact Manager to discuss partnering with us and adopting your local attainment goal.
A summary of data sources is available here. The data for the myFutureNC Attainment Profiles comes from various federal and state data-providing agencies. Some indicators are direct downloads from data providers; some indicators were provided by special request; and other indicators were derived by Carolina Demography.
No. The data source for the 2024 Attainment Profiles varies depending on the indicators, and the most recent year in which that data was released differs. For example, the information on Opportunity Youth is from the 5-Year 2022 American Community Survey, whereas the NC Pre-K indicator was updated using 2022-2023 school year data. The most recent year of data reflected on the dashboard depends on the source and release schedule. To find the year the data was released, a summary of data sources is available here.
Educational attainment data for North Carolina is sourced from the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The highest level of attainment for North Carolinians aged 25-44 can be found using ACS Table B15001.
While the Census Bureau does not track non-degree credentials, we recognize their importance to the state’s workforce. Therefore, we include an estimate from the Lumina Foundation, a national organization focused on educational attainment. The Lumina Foundation began providing estimates of the population with short-term credentials in 2018, with North Carolina’s estimates for 2018 and 2019 being 7.5%. Although these estimates have fluctuated, we have decided to hold the estimate constant at 7.5% based on stakeholder feedback and the limitations of current methodologies. This estimation is applied to each of the 100 counties. You can find the detailed methodology of this estimate here.
The peer county definition was based on ongoing conversations with the NC Rural Center about how to best classify counties for comparison. We adopted their recommended definition, based on the following classifications of the urban/rural continuum (based on 2020 Decennial Census data):
Our list of institutional locations and details on enrollments and student outcomes is derived from data provided by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics. The data on institutional location provided in their directory is limited to main campus locations.
The list of postsecondary institutions is limited to the institutions physically located within the county’s Prosperity Zone sub-region. In some instances, community college service areas overlap Prosperity Zone sub-region boundaries. In these cases, community colleges that serve these counties may not be listed in the postsecondary institutions table provided by IPEDS. We are working on developing a more exhaustive list of NC 2-year and 4-year postsecondary institutions that includes satellite campuses.
Opportunities for growth were identified by examining county performance on specific indicators relative to its peers (e.g., rural non-metro, rural metro, suburban, and urban). The three largest gaps between the county and peer county average performance were used to identify top opportunities for growth. If a county did not have three opportunity areas based on this evaluation, its performance was then compared to the state. If a county still did not have three opportunity areas, performance was then compared to the myFutureNC attainment goals for indicators with statewide goals.
The following indicators are the potential opportunities for growth:
All 100 counties have three top opportunities for growth.
