Since President Obama is now proposing to make community college free for anyone who wants to go, I thought it would be a good time to look at the rather extraordinary change in Americans' level of education that has occurred over the last 75 years. I made this chart using census data; note that the figures are for the proportion of Americans over the age of 25 who have achieved that level of education. (The high school graduate figures include those who went on to college and beyond.)
That's a stunning transformation, from a time when three-quarters of Americans never finished high school and fewer than 1 in 20 had a college degree, to today when nearly 9 in 10 get their high school diploma and almost a third of adults are college graduates.
