SDSU
Rural Life Census Data Center
Newsletter
August 2012
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Dr. Mike McCurry, SD State Demographer &
Director of SDSU's Rural Life Census Data Center
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Quick Links
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Non-immigrant Admissions
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The Office of Immigration Statistics has release Nonimmigrant Admissions to the United States: 2011 . This 9 page document surprised me with the increase over 2009, but as I read further, I realized the definition had changed. Time past, only the first admission was counted. Now each admission is counted. My Canadian high school classmates were only counted once - now their successors are counted every day they cross the line to go to school. They're listed under commuter students - 108,894 in 2011, versus 6,488 in 2009.
Relevant to higher education: 1,702,730 students came to the US as nonimmigrants in 2011, 895,392 in 2009. Whether we look at the 53 million admissions of 2011, or the 36 million individuals of 2009, there are a lot of people coming to America. As always, the total report has a lot more than the couple of kernels I mention.
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Education Trends in Young Adults
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The National Center for Education Statistics has released Trends Among Young Adults Over Three Decades, 1974-2006 (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012345.pdf ). While it's a composite of national statistics, it's useful in that it taps in on the end of the Baby Boom and contrasts it with the present. Since it looks exclusively at folks two years out of high school, it provides a view that might not be available in other studies. While it wasn't news that the percentage of people attending college has increased, it was interesting to see 1974's 39.6 percent enrolled in post-secondary education and compare it with 62.3 percent in 2006. In 1974, 33.9% of the young women had married by the time they were surveyed - in 2006, the married percentage had dropped to 5.6 percent. Children were another major change - dropping by about a third between 1974 and 2006. As always, there's a lot more in the report, and it's kind of interesting to see the differences a generation apart.
-Mike McCurry, Ph.D.
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Data Center Offers Collaborate Training Sessions
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The Rural Life and Census Data Center is pleased to be able to offer the following training sessions, open to all interested parties.
Sept 11 Taming Factfinder2 by Prekchya Singh
October 9 Confidence Levels and Confidence Intervals - How Trustworthy is the Data? by Mike McCurry
November 13 South Dakota's Population Projections by Eric Guthrie
December 11 Components of Population Change by Eric Guthrie and Mike McCurry.
The session will begin at 3:00 pm on the designated dates and can be accessed at:
https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2007004&password=M.5D9C5B7B3ADEC30581E3E81091794C
If you wish to sit in on the session(s) in person, come to Scobey Hall room 213 on the SDSU campus at the designated time.
Sessions will be archived with the links to be published in future newsletters. |
Projections Provide Opportunities
to Make Changes
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One interpretation of the Mayan calendar says that the world will end December 21, 2012. If that's so, the population projections that the Census and Rural Life Data Center has been working on will be irrelevant. Since we know the difference between projections and predictions, we will release the projections next month.
A prediction is a definite statement about the future (though classically couched in less than definite language), while a projection is a statement about the direction something is moving (in this case the population of the counties). A projection is a computation exercise that looks where a population has been, and from that point, says where the population is headed. When making projections we look at a number of data sources about the near past to make a statement about the future.
In these projections we consider the three basic components of change that affect a population: fertility, mortality, and migration. As an exercise, it is by its very nature looking backward to make a statement about where a population is likely to be in the future. A projection cannot make a definite statement about where a population will be with absolute certainty.
Projections are only as accurate as the assumptions used in their creation. There are events that occur over the course of history that cannot be predicted and cannot be incorporated into a projection. War, famine, and plague are the classic examples of issues that confound projections. For example, the projections of US population made in the 1920s did not incorporate the reduced fertility in the 1930s related to the Great Depression; nor could they build into their assumptions the baby boom that followed.
The simple fact is that the projections that are about to be released are a statement about where populations are likely to go absent major external forces to the contrary. Some communities will take these projections as a dire prediction of the inevitable. They are not; to the contrary, if a community does not like the direction that their population is likely to go, they should take these projections as an early warning signal of something they could actively work to change. In this way projections are very different from predictions.
To put it another way, when the soothsayer told Caesar to beware the Ides of March, he knew that Caesar was going to die that day. We do not know what the population of a certain community or area will be at a point in the future, but what we can say is based on our assumptions, the populations of these areas are heading in certain directions. If the people that live and work in those areas do not like the way that their populations are headed, this is their opportunity to make the changes necessary to avoid the undesired outcome.
Eric Guthrie
Graduate Research Assistant
Rural Life and Census Data Center
South Dakota State University
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The "Quality of Life Survey" was mailed out across South Dakota in late July. If you received one, we hope you have returned it. If you have one but have yet to turn it in, it's not too late. Please do so! There is a lot of interesting data to compile and we will share some of it here.
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Children's Well Being
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We've had some questions coming in about indicators of children's well-being. Extracting the data from the Census isn't all that easy - but Childstats.gov publishes 41 indicators in America's Children in Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2012 ( http://childstats.gov/pdf/ac2012/ac_12.pdf ). It's a national level 24 page booklet (I really prefer getting down to county level statistics, but the world doesn't always agree). Some of the trends are interesting - improve math scores for example, or that 22 percent of US children speak a language other than English at home.
Mike McCurry, Ph.D.
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State Pensions
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North Dakota and Vermont have fewer retirees on state pensions than South Dakota. As a state employee, I found the Census' "Annual Survey of Public Pensions: State Administered Defined Benefit
Data" (http://www.census.gov/govs/retire/state_retire.html) personally interesting - and my bet is that 52,862 current, former, and retired state employees will do the same. Frankly, it's not that common to describe a survey that has a chance of interesting 50,000 South Dakotans.
Seven state retirement systems have less assets than South Dakota's - while only six have fewer employees. California has the most state retirees: 847,135 -nearly an eighth of the state retirees in the nation. Mike McCurry, Ph.D.
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"Immigration, Offshoring and American Jobs"
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The Centre for Economic Performance has released a largely Census based study titled "Immigration, Offshoring and American Jobs". Since it's a topic I hear politicians bandying around, it's kind of nice to read the thoughts of someone who isn't running for office. It's a sixty-page analysis, filled with statistics and graphs, and actually fairly readable. This comment, taken from the conclusions, may motivate some people to read the whole study: Despite the widely held belief that immigration and offshoring are reducing the job opportunities of U.S. natives, we have found instead that, during our period of observation, manufacturing industries with a larger increase in global exposure (through offshoring and immigration) fared better than those with lagging exposure in terms of native employment growth." If you're interested, the study is available at http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1147.pdf
Mike McCurry, Ph.D.
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Data Center Activities Report
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On June 30, the State Census Data Center at the University of South Dakota closed, and assigned the duties to Dr. Bill Anderson's Government Research Bureau. Lacking a staff trained in demography, Bill began an informal relationship with South Dakota State University's Rural Life/Census Data Center to continue to provide data to the people of South Dakota. The chart below shows how the partnership worked during fiscal 10 and 11, and continues after SDSU's Rural Life/Census Data Center was designated as South Dakota's State Census Data Center in July, 2011. Data does not strictly follow fiscal years, as the transitions did not occur in the Data Center with that regularity.
Click HERE for Full Report
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Casey Foundation Publications Available | The Annie M. Casey Foundation has two new publications available on line: the 2012 Kids Count Data Book (national and state level statistics) at
http://datacenter.kidscount.org/DataBook/2012/OnlineBooks/KIDSCOUNT2012DataBookFullReport.pdf and Connecting People to Jobs: Neighborhood Workforce Pipelines at http://www.aecf.org/~/media/Pubs/Topics/Community%20Change/Workforce%20Development/ConnectingPeopletoJobsNeighborhoodWorkforcePi/Connecting_toJobs_report.pdf.
The Kids Count Data Book is the same book we've used so long, brouht up to date, while the Neighborhood Workforce Pipelines book offers a unique and tested approach for communities where unemployment is a problem
to families.
Mike McCurry, Ph.D.
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Pregnancy Stats in the 21st Century
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With the population projections project we've done a lot of math on births, deaths and migration. One of the intriguing facts is that the infant mortality rate went up in South Dakota - and I had the hypothesis that it went up because of better medical care. My premise was that we were seeing more older mothers, more low birth weights, and we were seeing a little increase in infant mortality reflected because of more successful higher risk pregnancies. The problem is that South Dakota is too small to provide the statistics that would support or shoot down the idea.
Fortunately, the Center for Disease control has released "Estimated Pregnancy Rates and Rates of Pregnancy Outcomes for the United States, 1990-2008,"
(http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_07.pdf) and it supports the idea that we're seeing a trend of older mothers. Each age cohort above 30 has increased their share of annual childbirths, each cohort below 30 has decreased - including the teens.
Mike McCurry, Ph.D.
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The Census has released the 2010 report on internet use
( http://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/publications/2010.html ). The survey data shows that 81.4 percent of the nation has a computer in the house (79.8 percent in South Dakota). Across the United States, 75.9 percent of the population lived in a house with internet access. In South Dakota, 73.6 percent of the population had internet access at home. The state with the lowest level of home internet access was New Mexico, at 64.1 percent, while Utah lead with 85.5 percent of its population having internet access at home.
Mike McCurry, Ph.D.
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21st Century Environment Risks
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Preparing for 21st Century Risks ( http://americanmanufacturing.org/files/Homeland%20Security%20Report.July23.2012.pd
f ) doesn't look much like demography at the start - but I started juggling statistics in snow surveys, looking at droughts and floods. A booklet that opens with the phrase, "The 21st century risk environment is creating an alarming trend in which the hyper-consequential, "500-year" event is occurring with greater frequency" kind of grabbed my attention. I always figured that if 500-year events occurred with greater frequency, the problem might be in our model - and looking at the report, the demographic data showed that - for example, vehicle miles traveled increased by eighty percent between 1980 and 2000, while the miles of road increased by two percent. It was news to me that 38 percent of the chlorine production occurs in Louisiana. I may not agree with all the conclusions, but it does offer some interesting facts.
Mike McCurry, Ph.D.
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South Dakota
State Data Center Affiliates
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Black Hills Council of Local Governments
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Central South Dakota Enhancement District
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First District Association of Local Governments
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Governor's Office of Economic Development
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Karl E Mundt Library
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Labor Market Information Center
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Northeast Council of Governments
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Northern State University
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Planning & Development District III
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Rural Life Census Data Center
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Sioux Falls Planning Department
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South Dakota Department of Health
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South Dakota State Data Center
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South Dakota State Library
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Southeast Council of Governments
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Cover letters and mailing labels for 6,000 surveys
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Mike on Population Studies
In most universities, demography is taught in the Sociology Department. That doesn't mean it's exclusively the domain of sociologists - the study of human populations at its simplest deals with birth, death, and migration.
My maps get a tremendous workout, which strongly suggest that demography is also a part of geography. Anything that deals with births and deaths has to be part of health sciences and biology. When you look at historic trends, there has to be space for demography under history. Food production and distribution brings in agriculture and economics.
I'm a sociologist and a demographer, but my field is pretty much multidisciplinary. I'm comfortable working with engineers, hydrologists and climate folks because we all use math to model and predict future events. Demography is everyone's science, and I want every South Dakotan who wants the knowledge to be able to learn demography.
With this in mind, the newsletter will be including basic topics of demography as well as what's new. Additionally, we'll be starting a monthly internet "how to" program that will be stored on the data center web page. If it works right, the insomniac rancher from Sheep Dip will be able to log in at 3:00 a.m. on Sunday morning and brighten the sleepless night with the joys of demography.
Here's the starting gate - since demography is based on birth, death and migration, we're going to start with births. Fertility, to be specific.
Fertility and Fecundity
Fertility is the number of births that occur to an individual or a population. Fecundity is a physiological term that refers to the ability to have children. They aren't the same although the term infertile is often used for infecund. Let me go through a few historic examples to show what's what.
If I type in "most fecund woman in the world" Google doesn't give me Feodor Vassilyev, an 18th century Russian Woman with 69 kids listed in the Guinness book. But, if the Guinness book is correct, she was (the search that finds her is "most fertile woman in the world"). With 69 children in 27 pregnancies, the claim may be valid both ways. But to a demographer, fecundity may be a number around 30, while fertility rarely makes double digits, because we work with populations instead of individuals.
On the other hand, there plenty of candidates for infecund or infertile. That number is always zero. Take Libby Custer for example - married in 1864, widowed in 1876, no children, no pregnancies. Obviously an infertile couple. Medical records from West Point show George treated for gonorrhea with a long stay in the hospital - some conclude that George was the infertile one of the pair as a result.
A realistic maximum fertility rate occurred with the Hutterites in the 1930's with an average of around 12 children per woman (that rate didn't continue).
Fertility rates are usually measured as total fertility rates - easily visualized as the average number of children in a family. While it's actually a synthetic rate that doesn't measure a real group of women, it's straight forward, and easy to calculate. Fortunately, the CIA calculates this for all nations, so it's easy to check their World Factbook and see that Niger leads the world with a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 7.52, while Singapore is at the bottom with 0.78.
The Replacement Birth Rate for both Singapore and the U.S. is about the same, somewhere around 2.07 to 2.1 These numbers are not too distant from the U.S. TFR of 2.06.
Two other commonly used measures include the crude birth rate (the number of babies born in a year divided by the population), the general fertility rate (the number of births per woman of childbearing age).
Mike McCurry, Ph.D.
State Demographer/Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology & Rural Studies
South Dakota State University
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We hope you enjoy this issue of the Rural Life Census Data Center newsletter. If you have any news tips or items that you would like to see included in a future newsletter, let us know at: 605-688-4899 or email: michael.mccurry@sdstate.edu
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