Source: ACS 2014 & ACS 5-Year Estimate
Vermont attracts a large number of retirement age people, and imports more college students than leave the state to attend college. In fact the number of in-migrant college attenders has grown substantially due to growing enrollment at some institutions. Among older age cohorts we see population loss. From a workforce perspective, the increase in out-migration among 25-54 year-olds is a trend to watch because this is the age group needed to ‘backfill’ a wave of retiring baby boomers. Small annual losses among younger households compound over the years, as well as impacting birth rates. Vermont’s Joint Fiscal Office assessed a loss of nearly 1,000 people in the 25-54 age range in the last decade.
Source: VT Agency of Education
Vermont began a new testing regime in 2015 to evaluate the achievement gap in K-12 education and assess mastery of specific content by individual children. As in last year’s testing results, English language proficiency is strong among a majority of younger students as well as a majority of high schoolers. In contrast, math proficiency rates are high in the younger students but decline steadily in higher grades.
Source: National Science Foundation
Vermont was ranked 11th highest in the nation for the number of public high school students achieving 3 or above (out of 5) on Advanced Placement tests. 1,500 of Vermont public high school graduates (23.9%) attained high AP scores, the greatest number as well as percentage of total graduates to do so in the nation. The number of eligible high school graduates factored into this study in 2008 was 7,392, in 2014 it was 6,278.