U.S. Young Adults, Age 25–29 · 1940–2024
Hold the age constant and the rise is even starker. Among Americans who had just turned 25 to 29 — not the whole 25-and-over workforce, which mixes in every earlier generation — the bachelor’s-degree rate went from 1 in 17 in 1940 to 2 in 5 today.
Method: Percent of persons age 25 to 29 who had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher, U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey (Annual Social and Economic Supplement), as published in NCES’s Digest of Education Statistics, Table 104.20. This is the standard age-consistent measure of generational attainment: because it always looks at the same narrow age band, it isn’t diluted or inflated by how many older or younger workers happen to be in the labor force in a given year — unlike the “25 and over” share in The Credentialed Majority. Sampling reflects the source: selected benchmark years before 2005 (as originally published), annual from 2005 onward — the wider spacing of early markers is the actual publishing interval, not missing data.
| Year | Bachelor’s+ (%), ages 25–29 |
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