WalletHub published “2017’s Most & Least Educated States” last month.   Based on their findings, we raise the following two questions:

  • Are the most popular states to international students also the most educated states?
  • Is the number of a state’s top schools closely correlated with the state’s ranking in “Most & Least Educated States”?

In order to answer the questions, we used data from 3 sources for our table below:

  1. “Rank in Most Educated” – from WalletHub
  2. “Rank in Int’l Students” and “# of Int’l Students”- from The Open Doors Data
  3. “# of Top Schools”- from Schools’ websites, U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, Princeton Review

Note: “Int’l” is the abbreviation for “International”; only the top 42 states are listed in “Rank in Most Educated.”


Most Educated States  vs International Students vs Top Schools

Our Findings:

(1) The “Rank in Most Educated” is not closely correlated with the “# of Int’l Students” and the  “# of Top Schools.”

(2) The “Rank in Int’l Students” is not closely related to the “Rank in Most Educated.”

 

We have also found that the more top schools a state has, the more international students it attracts.   This reveals college rankings do matter to international students’ school selection.


 The Most & Least Educated States 2017
<iframe src="//d2e70e9yced57e.cloudfront.net/wallethub/embed/31075/geochart.html" width="556" height="347" frameBorder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe><!-- [et_pb_line_break_holder] --><div style="width:556px;font-size:12px;color:#888;">Source: <a href="https://wallethub.com/edu/most-educated-states/31075/">WalletHub</a></div>