Research

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 […]

Perhaps no event in Virginia’s history had more of an impact on its population than the four years of war between 1861 and 1865. The war resulted in an unknown number of deaths, freedom from slavery for close to a third of its population, and the secession of West Virginia. Though historians have attempted to […]

Despite the importance of the decennial census, its scope, purpose, and constitutional foundation are not widely understood.  Recently, the Census Bureau conducted the 2020 Census Barriers, Attitudes, and Motivators Study (CBAMS), which found that two-thirds of the U.S. population have only a cursory knowledge of the census. This unfamiliarity with how the census works is […]

In today’s data-rich, technology-driven world, the decennial counting of every person in the United States may seem archaic. However, the census is unique as it counts everybody living in the U.S. and is the foundation for all data collections.  On the government side, census data informs how congressional districts are redrawn and determines where government […]

Manufacturing has played a significant role in U.S history. In 1790, during the first State of the Union address, President George Washington highlighted the importance of manufacturing for military supplies: “their (A free people) safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories, as tend to render them independent on others, for essential, particularly […]

The Cooper Center recently released population projections through the year 2040 for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In addition to detailing information about projected changes to the size of the national and state populations over the next couple of decades, the data release also breaks down projected populations by age group and […]