I’ve written a couple of pieces over the years detailing the educational attainment gaps between the various parts of the state. The main hook I used for those pieces was an old Bill Shipp quote that without Metro Atlanta, the state of Georgia would be more poorly educated than Mississippi.

As a native Mississippian, I initially found that statement a bit improbable. And, for the sake of my adopted state, I hoped it wasn’t true. Sadly, it was — and still is. In fact, the long-ago assessment by Shipp, the legendary Atlanta Constitution editor and lifelong curmudgeon who passed away in 2023, may be even more accurate now than when he made it.

My conclusions are based on a mind-numbing dive into the latest data from the American Community Survey, a U.S. Census Bureau product that produces rolling five-year state and county averages on a range of socioeconomic metrics, including educational attainment. The ACS surveys 3.5 million U.S. addresses a year and bases its estimates on a total of more than 17 million interviews. The latest data is for the period 2019 through 2023.

In that latest batch of data, the ACS provided estimates of the number of adults in 3,143 U.S. counties (and a few cities) that: a) never finished high school, b) only finished high school, c) got some college or technical school education, and d) graduated from a four-year college and may have earned an advanced degree. To tests Shipp’s claim (again!), I pulled data on all those counties and calculated what I call the Trouble in God’s Country Educational Attainment Index (TIGC EA Index, for short).

That’s an admittedly unsophisticated formula that assigns a value of negative-1 to the share of a local adult population that never finished high school or got a GED; a plus-1 to the percentage that finished high school but went no further; a plus-2 to the share that got some college or technical school education; and a plus-3 for the percentages that earned at least a four-year college degree. I ran that formula for all 3,143 jurisdictions in the current database and produced TIGC EA Indexes for each of them. Then I ranked all those jurisdictions based on their Index ratings and sliced that list into national quartiles.

Here’s some of what I found:

–Overall, Georgia earned a TIGC EA Index of 174.2 and ranked 36th among the 50 states and just a little below the national average. According to the 2019-2023 ACS data, 11.0% of the state’s adult population never finished high school; 26.9% did but went no further; 27.9% got at least some college or technical school training; and 34.2% earned at least a four-year college degree. But that high-level view is frankly deceptive and only sets the stage for the latest test of Shipp’s claim. To wit:

–My 12-county Trouble in God’s Country Metro Atlanta region (which I now call “Atlanna”) scored a TIGC EA Index of 197.7 and, if it were a state unto itself, would rank 4th nationally — behind (but not much) Colorado, Vermont and Massachusetts. The TIGC EA Index for the remaining 147 counties (“Notlanna,” of course) is 152.6 and put this combined area (true to Shipp’s assessment) behind Mississippi and just ahead of West Virginia, which is dead last. This gap between Atlanna and Notlanna is perhaps the best way I’ve found of illustrating the extent of the divide between the state’s haves and have-nots.

–I’ll publish a searchable list of Georgia counties along with their TIGC EA Index and their national ranks in a future post, but here’s a preview. The table below lists Georgia’s top and bottom three counties, along with key data points. Few states have such a wide gap between their top and bottom counties.

This map is aimed at illustrating the geographic spread of the state’s educational attainment muscle. The darker the green, the higher TIGC EA Index and the further the county is above the state’s average index of 174.2; the darker the red, the lower the county’s score and the further it is below the state average. Counties that appear in pale green or pale red are close to the state average.

–Size matters. Some 103 of Georgia’s 159 counties have populations of less than 35,000 people. Collectively, that group of counties scored a TIGC EA Index of 133.9, well below last-place West Virginia. In fact, those 103 Georgia counties have worse educational attainment numbers than Puerto Rico, which is a U.S. territory. I don’t ordinarily include Puerto Rico in these analyses, but I thought it was worth checking here: Its 2019-2023 TIGC Educational Index comes out to 142.6

–Some 81 Georgia counties are in the bottom national quartile for educational attainment, and those counties are home to more than a million working-age adults. I’ll have more about this in a follow-up post, but that’s an inordinate share of the state’s population and is an eery echo of what I’ve found in studying Georgia’s recent Per Capita Income (PCI) performance. Only California and Texas, with much larger populations, have more people living in bottom quartile counties.

This concentration of poor economic and educational performance has significant socioeconomic implications. To set the stage for a follow-up post, I’ll offer a brief comparison between Georgia and North Carolina. Look at the two states’ statewide numbers and you won’t find much difference. Here’s a quick look at their state-level educational attainment numbers from the 2019-2023 ACS data.

Again, you could look at those numbers above and be forgiven there’s not much to get all worked up about. They’re about as comparable as you can get.

But slice their adult popuations by national quartile and you get a very different picture — and here I’ll use the actual ACS population estimates for each quartile as well as (in parentheses) the share of total adults population represented by those estimates.

The picture suggested in this national quartile split wasn’t always the case. Indeed, in the not too distant past, North Carolina had larger shares of its population (adult and total) mired in the bottom quartile than Georgia — and Georgia had better numbers at the top. Now, North Carolina has built a substantial advantage in attracting people to its top quartile counties, and it has greatly reduced the share stuck in its bottom quartile counties. Also worth noting: While more than half of Georgia’s counties seem stuck in the bottom national quartile, the same is true of less than a quarter of North Carolina’s.

Put another way, North Carolina has done a better job of moving its population up the educational attainment ladder, first into the middle tiers and now into the top tier — and this split matters. Again, these numbers hold socioeconomic implications for the states as a whole, and especially for the people stuck in the bottom quartiles. Watch this space.