Terence P. Jeffrey, CNS, December 19, 2018

California ranks No. 1 among the 50 states for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 50th for the percentage who have graduated from high school, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

Texas ranks No. 2 for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 49th for the percentage who have graduated from high school.

9.7 percent of California residents 25 and older, the Census Bureau says, never completed ninth grade. Only 82.5 percent graduated from high school.

8.7 percent of Texas residents 25 and older never completed ninth grade, and only 82.8 percent graduated from high school.

California and Texas — while having the highest percentages of residents 25 and older who never finished ninth grade and the lowest percentages who graduated from high school — are the nation’s two most populous states.

In fact, the 2,510,370 California residents 25 and older who, according to the Census Bureau, never finished ninth grade outnumber the entire populations of 15 other states.

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Ten states exceeded the nationwide level of residents 25 and older who have never finished ninth grade. These include: California (9.7 percent), Texas (8.7 percent), New York (6.5 percent), New Mexico (6.5 percent), Kentucky (6.1 percent), Nevada (5.9 percent), Arizona (5.9 percent), Mississippi (5.6 percent), Rhode Island (5.5 percent), and Louisiana (5.4 percent).

Wyoming — with 1.8 percent — had nation’s smallest percentage of residents 25 and older who never finished ninth grade.

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In Texas, the resident population 25 and older was 17,454,431. Of those individuals, 1,513,995 — or 8.7 percent — never completed ninth grade. That outnumbers the populations of 11 states.

[Editor’s Note: The original story contains three bar graphs showing the ranking of each of the 50 states with respect to number of people who have not finished high school, number of high-school graduates, and number of people with college degrees.]