To first determine if education affects the income and type of jobs available in Hawai'i, we must first look at how Hawai'i's population compares in getting different education levels. Overall, Hawai'i has a higher percentage of people attempting college while the US has a higher percentage of people with a graduate's degree. However, for both the US and Hawai'i, the highest percentage were people obtaining their high school diploma as their highest education levels while the next highest values were with people with a Bachelor's Degree. From this particular data set, we can conclude that gender hasn't majorly impacted one's ability to gain a degree, although Hawai'i has a lot more people attempting to get a college degree.
Since it was determined that gender hasn't made a major impact on getting a degree, we decided to see if race impacts one's ability to gain a degree. With someone's race, it goes beyond what their genetic makeup is. A person's race can also influence their beliefs, culture, home life, and so much more that can potentially affect how far one can take their education. Thus, it was interesting to see the results of the data. As expected, the races were pretty even when it came to obtaining a person's high school diploma; however, the numbers began to show a higher difference once it came to obtaining a college degree. People who labeled their ethnicity as white tended to have a much higher success rate in obtaining a college degree whereas people who labeled their ethnicity as islander had a much lower success rate, with a difference of 30% between the two groups. Almost every group had a lower success rate in getting a college degree than the national average. This data set could indicate a number of things; however we know that race does play a part in one's ability to gain a college degree.
Now that we've established how education attainment is affected by gender and race, we can now see how education attainments are affecting other parts of life. In this first part, we can see how one's education level affects their income levels. As expected, if one's education level is higher, they tend to gain a higher income. However, what was interesting to see was the difference in income between genders with the same education level. As education level grows higher, the difference in income between the genders also grew. Looking at the group with a graduate's degree, for example, shows that there is over a $20,000 difference between males and females.
The next set of data shows both the Poverty and Employment rate in Hawai'i grouped by education attainment. As we can see, the employment rate goes up the higher the level of education one gains while the poverty rate goes down. This goes along with the previous data set where the income grows as one gains a higher level of education. This shows that there is actually a vast difference between the different levels. For example, if a high school graduate attempts some college courses, the employment rate increases by 3.5% while the poverty rate drops by a little over 4%. This shows that there is a higher chance for one to be "successful" if they increase their education level.
Now that we established that one's education level does influence a person's income and chances of being in poverty, we decided to see if the employment rate could also be affected by other things, in this case a person's race. As we saw earlier, race influenced a person's ability or desire to gain a higher level of education. Thus, it would be interesting to see if race also plays a part in a person's ability or desire to work. As we can see, in the data set, there is a slight difference in employment rates across different races. This could be because of their culture, beliefs, health pre dispositions, etc. For example, one's lifestyle that they learned from their culture may have them prefer the wives being full time mothers, thus lowering the race's employment rate. If that is the case, if one is just expecting to be a full time mom at home, they may not feel the need to go to a higher level education institution.
This last data set is just to show the different types of occupations available in Hawai'i and how much people are making in the different fields. It is interesting to see that the fields with higher average incomes usually are fields we associate with getting a higher degree, such as healthcare practitioners, architecture and engineering jobs, whereas the fields with a higher number of people working are usually fields we associate without needing a college degree, such as food preparations, office and administrative support, and sales jobs.