This Is America’s Least-Educated Town

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 25, 9:30AM EDT

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This Is America’s Least-Educated Town — © Courtesy of the City of Cactus, Texas via Facecbook

Using education data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 24/7 Wall St. identified the least educated town in the United States. For our purposes, towns are defined as any place covered by the census within the 50 states and the District of Columbia with a population between 1,000 and 25,000.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among adults with a four-year college education was 5.5% in 2020. Meanwhile, the jobless rate among those with no more than a high school diploma was 9.0%. In the least educated town, the five-year average overall unemployment rate among 25- to 64-year-olds is higher than the comparable national rate of 4.4%.

In addition to being better protected from unemployment, Americans with a bachelor’s degree also tend to have higher salaries. The average weekly wage for a college-educated worker in the United States is about 67% higher than it is for those with no more than a high school diploma. In places with lower than average educational attainment, incomes also tend to be lower than average. In all but one town on this list, the typical household earns less in a year than the national median household income of $62,843.

To determine America’s least educated town, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed five-year estimates of the percentage of adults 25 years and over with at least a bachelor’s degree in U.S. towns from the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey (ACS).
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We used census “place” geographies, a category that includes 29,573 incorporated legal entities and census-designated statistical entities. We only considered the 29,320 places that had boundaries that fell within one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia. We defined towns based on population thresholds (having at least 1,000 people and less than 25,000 people) and 13,332 of the places fell within these thresholds.

Towns were then excluded if bachelor’s degree or higher attainment rates were not available in the 2019 ACS, if the town’s 25 and older population was less than 1,000, or if the sampling error associated with a town’s data was deemed too high.

The sampling error was defined as too high if the coefficient of variation (a statistical assessment of how reliable an estimate is) for a town’s bachelor’s or higher attainment rate was above 15% and greater than two standard deviations above the mean coefficient of variation for all towns’ bachelor’s or higher attainment rate. We similarly excluded towns that had a sampling error too high for their 25 and over population estimates, using the same definition.

The remaining 10,738 places were ranked based on the share of adults 25 years and over with at least a bachelor’s degree. To break ties, we used the percentage of adults 25 and over who have completed at least high school or its equivalent.

Additional information on the share of adults 25 years and over who have completed at least high school or its equivalent, median household income, unemployment rates for the 16 and older population in the civilian labor force and population figures are also five-year estimates from the 2019 ACS.

The least educated town in America is Cactus, Texas. Here are the details:

Adults with at least a bachelor’s degree: 0.0% reported
Adults with at least a high school diploma or equivalent: 27.3% (lowest)
Median household income: $40,417 (tied for 2,011th lowest)
Estimated unemployment rate 2015-2019: 0.5% (tied for 10,502nd highest)
Population: 3,245

Click here to see all of America’s least-educated towns.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.