15 Most Educated States in America: 2024

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If you look at how much education a person has, you’ll see that Americans with more education generally have higher income potential and lower chances of unemployment. 

A new study from the personal finance website WalletHub shows that some states are able to provide better quality education than others. 

“Getting a good education doesn’t guarantee high future earnings and better opportunities, but there’s a definite correlation,” WalletHub analyst Cassandra Happe said in a statement. “It’s certainly worth living in one of the most educated states, which offer high-quality learning from childhood all the way through the university level. That’s especially true if you plan to raise children.”

In its study, WalletHub compared all 50 states across two key dimensions in order to determine the country’s most and least educated states:

• Educational attainment, including the share of adults 25 and older with at least a high school diploma, with at least a bachelor’s degree and with at least a graduate or professional degree.
• Quality of education and attainment gap between genders and races, including quality of school system, public school graduation rate and average quality of universities, as well as racial and gender gap in educational attainment.  

Researchers examined those dimensions using 18 relevant metrics and graded each one on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most educated state. WalletHub noted that in certain metrics in which women showed an advantage over men and Black people over white people, it gave equal credit to states with no gender/racial inequality. 

See the accompanying gallery for the 15 best educated states in America, according to WalletHub.

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