Louisiana is falling behind the rest of the country when it comes to holding college degrees, certifications and other post-secondary education credentials.
A new report published Tuesday ranks Louisiana 49th in the country in the number of college graduates as a percentage of the population, with 29.1 percent of the state’s nearly 2.4 million working age adults holding either a two- or four-year degree.
Louisiana has a long way to go to catch up with the national average of 39.4 percent and an even longer way to catch up with Massachusetts, which leads the nation at 50.5 percent — the only state in which a majority of its population holds degrees.
The report was the fourth published by the Lumina Foundation — a private nonprofit committed to getting 60 percent of Americans a college degree, certification in some field or other credentials by 2025, according to its website.
The state ranked better than only West Virginia, where 27.8 percent held a degree. The Baton Rouge and New Orleans metropolitan areas fared slightly better than the state at large, with about 33 percent of the population in both areas having some kind of post-secondary education.
The Pelican State is also lagging significantly in long-term growth prospects for degree growth, with the report projecting only 34.5 percent of the working age population will have a degree by 2025.
The report noted Louisiana has seen growth over the past four years, with 1.2 percent increase from 2011 to 2012, as compared to the 0.3 percent drop from 2010 to 2011.
Lumina’s study illuminates racial distributions of degrees, showing Asians leading the state with about 47 percent holding a degree. Native Americans and African-Americans have the smallest concentration of degrees, with about 16 and 18 percent respectively. These deficits are worse than the national average of about 27 percent for African-Americans and 23 percent for Native Americans.
The most underrepresented racial group in regard to college degrees in the U.S. is Hispanics, with 20 percent of the country’s Hispanic population having attained a college degree. In Louisiana, they’re the third best, with nearly 23 percent of the state’s Hispanic population holding a degree.