What's New — September 2001

Site of the Month: National Commission on Entrepreneurship

Not often does the dry field of statistics merit note on the editorial page of the New York Times. We were surprised and please to see a short editorial "New Numbers to Crunch" (August 9), which hailed the launching of September's site of the month, the Census 2000 Supplemental Survey, as "what could be a yearly gold mine of information." Billed as full-scale dress rehearsal of the long-planned American Community Survey (which has been rolled out it selected jurisdictions for the past few years), the supplemental survey poses a series of questions that traditionally have been part of the Census long form to a sample of 700,000 households nationally. The Bureau's plan is the repeat this kind of survey on an annual basis, so that researchers don't have to wait ten years between decennial census-takings.

Data from the supplemental survey, nicknamed C2SS, is being made available on the web. You can get statewide rankings now, as well as detailed state data. Data for counties and places with 250,000 or more population will be available in a few months. One hallmark of the supplemental survey is the more prominent publication of confidence intervals for survey estimates. If you haven't had a chance to look at the early American Community Survey data, C2SS offers you a look at the direction Census Bureau is headed in.

Highlights of C2SS data on the web are as follows:

Tables ranking states for educational attainment, median household income, median house value, language other than English, and percent of people in poverty. http://www.census.gov/c2ss/www/Products/Rank.htm

Quick tables and detailed tables available for states, C2SS 2000. Data for counties and places of 250,000 or greater due winter 2001-02 http://www.census.gov/c2ss/www/Products/Profiles/200

Detailed C2SS tables for states, 2000. http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DatasetTableListServ

New Links Added

It's back-to-school month for the nation, and appropriately, this month's new links highlight a number of new and updated education-related links. New links to data provided by the College Board and the National Center for Education Statistics describe state and regional variations in educational budgets and key measures of educational performance.

a) College Entrance Examination Board

Profiles of academic experience and SAT scores of college-bound seniors, by state, 1998-latest year. Data cover academic record, course-taking patterns, college plans, high school information, and SAT mean scores and distributions. http://www.collegeboard.org/sat/cbsenior/html/stat00c.htm

Average SAT scores by state for 1990 and 1997-2000. Published 2001.
 http://www.collegeboard.org/press/senior00/html/table3.

b) National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education

Comprehensive, annual, national statistical database of information concerning all public elementary and secondary schools and school districts. Contains information on schools and school districts; data on students and staff; and fiscal data.
http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/

Trends in postsecondary education at the institution and state levels, including enrollments, completions, and revenues and expenditures. http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/

Query-retrieved information on individual postsecondary institutions, public schools and districts, public libraries, and private schools in the United States. http://nces.ed.gov/globallocator/

Data from several NCES compendia, including The Condition of Education, The Digest of Education Statistics, and Projections of Education Statistics. http://nces.ed.gov/edstats/

Education finance information for elementary/secondary public or private education, for states and school districts. http://nces.ed.gov/edfin/

c) National Forum on Education Statistics

Links to state and local school "report cards" found online in U.S. state and territorial departments of education, as of August 2000.
 http://nces.ed.gov/forum/performance.asp

The Latest State Personal Income Data

Earlier this year, the Bureau of Economic Analysis completed its annual revision and updating of state and metro area personal income estimates. These data offer a detailed picture of economic performance through 1999.

Analysis of State Personal Income data, with rankings.
 http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/newsrel/spi0401.htm

Rankings of metro areas regarding personal income growth and per capita income
 http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/newsrel/mpi0501.htm

In interpreting the BEA income data, its useful to know a bit about the methodology used to generate the data, and to see how other analysts are interpreting it. Some interesting articles are available on the BEA website.

Links to articles analyzing BEA regional income and employment data, from Survey of Current Business and other sources. http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/regional/articles.htm

Yet another set of state and metro rankings

The media never seem to tire of offering up rankings of different economies, and when they appear on the web, you can count on EconData.Net to let you know about them. The latest set of rankings of economic activity is from bCentral, Microsoft's website that offers up much of the content from various regional business journals throughout the nation. A statistical component of the site-- Demographics Daily--provides rankings of state and metro area economies base on a star system (the best performing economies get five stars, the laggards get one star). The methodology behind the star system isn't fully explained, but you can click through to individual states and metro areas to see the most recent employment, unemployment, income and job growth data. (The data are presumably taken from BLS reports but the bCentral site doesn't cite its sources). Access to the rankings is free with registration.

Monthly economic ratings for states and DC, based on population, employment, and income trends.
 http://bizjournals.bcentral.com/journals/demographics/ratings/state.htmlMonthly

Economic ratings for 276 metro areas, based on population, employment, and income trends. http://bizjournals.bcentral.com/journals/demographics/ratings/metro.html