Levels of Education by Race

From the CDC:

These graphs provide real data, but they also help us to formulate a kind of model--a way to project how the data will continue to change. There are a few peculiar aspects of the graph, specifically that they y-axis goes all the way to 120%, an irrelevant number. The width of the bars actually varies a bit if you look at it closely.

One thing I noticed about the larger graphs is that they are a bit cluttered, so it's easier to see major trends by looking at the thumbnails. The first graph of each size represents the level of education attained by african-americans between 1940 and 2006. By looking at the thumbnail of the graph, it is easier to see that the percentage of people attaining only 8th-grade level of education or less decreases significantly. In contrast, the percentage of people attaining 4 years of high school increases from 0 to 20%.
Similar trends can be seen in the graphs of hispanic americans, but they percentage of people attaining 8th-grade or less decreases much less drastically. The hispanic community is not witnessing the same amount of increase in 4 years of high school.

In the future we can expect that the percentage of people in both groups who attain an 8th-grade level of education or less will continue to decline, but that it will decline faster in the african-american community than in the hispanic community.