Research

The traditional higher-education system works for many, but not everyone desires or can afford a college degree. About one in three US adults age 18 and older hold a high school degree as their highest level of education. While well-paying jobs for workers with a high school diploma alone still exist, they have rapidly declined. […]

This 2019 survey was conducted on behalf of the James City County Board of Supervisors to gather public opinion as the County began the process of updating its Comprehensive Plan.

Having a crystal ball that could foresee the future would be ideal, but in reality we can only rely on our ability to project Virginia’s population based on past trends. Population projections provide a lens to look into the future to anticipate what the decades ahead may hold. While projections are inherently uncertain, as the […]

The presentation outlines the decision to create the regional panel and the steps taken to support it.

Looking further than educational attainmentWhen viewing regional profiles, it is typical to see statistics for educational attainment – the highest level of education obtained by a person currently living in an area – as the predominant metric for talent. This is commonly depicted as the percent of the population with a college degree (bachelor’s degree […]

Over the past three decades, the level of educational attainment has increased in the U.S. labor force. Between 1992 and 2016, the share of the people with a bachelor’s degree has increased from 18 percent to 25 percent, and those with an advanced degree-including master’s, professional, and doctoral degrees-has increased from 9 to 14 percent. […]

Economic divergence between America’s urban and rural areas has been one of the most frequently discussed trends during the past decade. Dimensions of this divergence include growth (or loss) in population, jobs, and household income. Population estimates released by the Weldon Cooper Center earlier this year showed that 94 percent of growth in Virginia since […]

A survey recording customers’ overall satisfaction with the Fairfax County Department of Family Services’ (DFS) quality and range of services in 2019.

Readers of our web series will be familiar with past posts describing population change in Virginia and the factors that drive this change (mortality, fertility, and migration). Although we frequently examine and write about each these components of population change individually, they are intricately intertwined, often in predictable ways. Demographers have observed, for example, that many countries followed a […]

Crime data are dynamic across space and time, with offenses occurring, incidents being reported, arrests being made, or property being recovered. The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting1 (UCR) program tracks long-term trends and provides snapshots-in-time of criminal incidents across the country. In 2017, an estimated 1,247,321 violent crimes (offenses that involve force or threat of force […]