Research

This survey was conducted in 2017 for the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education to identify and update the skills that are most valuable to the state’s employers.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful” – George BoxTrying to predict the future is a risky business because it is inherently uncertain, but we need to do so in order to plan.The Cooper Center recently released Virginia population projections for 2020-2040. The projections were developed by extrapolating historical population trends. As part of […]

Last month our office released Virginia’s population projections for 2020 until 2040. If you combed through the data tables, then you may have noticed one striking prediction—Whites will make up less than half of Virginia’s population by 2040. Recently, the Census Bureau made a similar projection for the nation as a whole. While these types […]

Our recently released population projections for Virginia show that the total population is projected to expand to nearly 8.75 million residents by 2020 and to over 10 million residents by 2040. A large number of these people will be 65 or older. Virginia’s elderly population is anticipated to nearly double in size between 2010 and […]

Latest population projections show that Virginia will continue to grow steadily over time, and be home to more than 10 million people by 2040. The statewide growth rate is starting to slow down from 13% over 2000-2010 to a little over 9% between 2010-2020, which is consistent with trends observed at the national level. Comparing […]

Forecasting weather accurately is rarely possible but the public counts on exactly that – an accurate prediction. And the combination doesn’t always work out well as illustrated in the 2005 film, The Weather Man, when Nicholas Cage, who plays a meteorologist, sometimes gets the weather forecast wrong and is pelted with half-consumed fast food by […]

Job polarization refers to a situation in the labor force where growth is concentrated among both low-and high-wage jobs, while the number of middle-wage jobs declines. Inspired by a blog post about job polarization in Oregon since the Great Recession, I found that the same trend holds true for Virginia. While the number of low-and […]

I recently needed to research the commuting flows of the Charlottesville workforce and resident population to learn about the daytime population, and I needed to have an idea of what was happening at the neighborhood level. The U.S. Census’ Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) made this level of analysis possible. LODES data include […]

“Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have” is a quote often ascribed to the British PM Sir Winston Churchill. In that spirit, and in light of the recent health care reform debate within the US, I wondered what the current picture of health coverage actually looks like.  The Census Bureau offers tools […]

This morning the Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia released its 2016 population estimates for Virginia’s counties and cities. The most obvious trend in the population estimates is how much more slowly Virginia and most of its communities are growing this decade. Since 2010, Virginia’s population has grown by a little over 410,000 residents. […]