Graduate or professional degree, explained
Share of adults 25+ with a graduate or professional degree.
What it measures
The percentage of adults age 25 and older whose highest completed credential is a graduate or professional degree, master's, MD, JD, MBA, PhD, or other terminal qualification. This is a subset of the bachelor's-or-higher group; everyone in the graduate-degree numerator is also counted in the bachelor's-or-higher numerator. The denominator is the population 25 and older. The metric captures the share of the adult population that has gone beyond the four-year degree, which is increasingly the entry credential for knowledge-economy professional roles in law, medicine, academia, research, and high-end management consulting.
Why it matters
Graduate-degree share is the strongest local-area predictor of professional and technical services employment, the cluster of industries (law firms, hospitals, research labs, consulting practices, engineering firms) that anchor most thriving knowledge-economy metros. The metric also correlates tightly with median household income at the high end: every metro above 25% graduate-degree share has a median household income above the national average. For universities and academic medical centers, graduate-degree share is a recruiting and retention metric, they need to be located somewhere their spouses can find work appropriate to their training.
Top US places by graduate degree
Top 25 per geography type from the latest ACS vintage. See the full ranking links for the complete eligible universe.
Top states (2024)
SEE ALL 51 →Top metro areas (2024)
SEE ALL 925 →Top counties (2024)
SEE ALL 3,144 →Top cities (2024)
SEE ALL 6,826 →Top ZIP codes (2024)
SEE ALL 16,893 →How the Census measures it
Same source as the other education metrics, ACS Table B15003. CensusEasy sums the master's, professional school, and doctorate categories and divides by the population 25 and older. The Bureau changed the question wording slightly between 1990 and 2000 to better distinguish professional from doctoral degrees, so comparisons before 2000 should be treated with care.
How to read the numbers
The US graduate-degree share is about 14%. The highest figures are in academic and government-policy hubs, Bethesda, Maryland; Berkeley, California; Brookline, Massachusetts; Princeton, New Jersey, where 40%+ of adults hold a graduate degree. State figures range from about 7% in Mississippi and West Virginia to over 20% in Massachusetts. A graduate-degree share above 25% in a city usually means a major university, an academic medical center, a research lab, or a federal-government installation is anchoring the local economy.
Caveats and limitations
The category groups together degrees of very different labor-market value, a one-year MBA from an unranked program counts the same as a PhD from a top research university. The metric also doesn't distinguish between active and retired credential-holders, so places with lots of educated retirees (some coastal Florida communities, a few wealthy mountain towns) score higher than their working-age labor force alone would suggest.