GVU's Fifth WWW User Survey General Graphs

Education

Notes:

Overall, the distribution of educational attainment has stabilized from the trend of increasingly lower levels of attainment as seen in the Second, Third, and Fourth Surveys. The profile observed in the Fifth Survey closely resembles the Fourth survey, with 56.5% of the users having completed college or a more advanced degree (compared to 55.0% in the Fourth and 73% in the Second Survey).

European users (23.1% Masters, 5.4% Doctoral) tend to have more advanced degrees than the US users (16.2% Masters, 3.4% Doctoral).
In the US, the percent of users who have completed only grammar school increased from 1.9% in the Fourth Survey to 2.7% in the Fifth Survey, indicating more younger users.

Notes:

The differences between the educational attainment of female and male users continues to decrease. Nearly the same number of women and men have graduated from college (33.1% female vs 32.9 male), with more women how have completed some college (29.9%) than men (26.1%). However, men have more doctoral and professional degrees (7.3% men vs 4.9% female).

Notes:

Not surprisingly, the 19-25 age group reports having significantly lower levels of educational attainment than the other groups. Likewise, the 50+ age group (34.1% Masters/Doctoral) has more advanced degrees than the 26-50 age group (25.4% Masters/Doctoral).

Table of Data for All Categories

education All Male Female USA Europe 19-25 26-50 50+

abitur 21
0.18%
20
0.25%
1
0.03%
0
0.00%
20
1.57%
10
0.37%
9
0.13%
0
0.00%

college 3869
32.97%
2646
32.89%
1223
33.13%
2904
33.73%
350
27.56%
969
35.42%
2560
36.83%
260
26.69%

doctoral 450
3.83%
363
4.51%
87
2.36%
316
3.67%
69
5.43%
7
0.26%
332
4.78%
99
10.16%

grammar 316
2.69%
189
2.35%
127
3.44%
217
2.52%
24
1.89%
8
0.29%
25
0.36%
7
0.72%

high 1008
8.59%
688
8.55%
320
8.67%
616
7.16%
117
9.21%
256
9.36%
331
4.76%
48
4.93%

masters 1908
16.26%
1326
16.48%
582
15.77%
1393
16.18%
293
23.07%
191
6.98%
1436
20.66%
233
23.92%

other 169
1.44%
114
1.42%
55
1.49%
77
0.89%
49
3.86%
22
0.80%
75
1.08%
11
1.13%

professional 404
3.44%
310
3.85%
94
2.55%
285
3.31%
42
3.31%
24
0.88%
314
4.52%
52
5.34%

some 3203
27.29%
2100
26.10%
1103
29.88%
2550
29.62%
267
21.02%
1172
42.84%
1605
23.09%
229
23.51%

special 388
3.31%
289
3.59%
99
2.68%
251
2.92%
39
3.07%
77
2.81%
264
3.80%
35
3.59%

For more information or to submit comments:
send e-mail to www-survey@cc.gatech.edu.
GVU's WWW Surveying Team
Graphics, Visualization, & Usability Center
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280