State Plates
The Louisiana Education Plate
In Louisiana, education plates turn on attainment — the credentials a population carries. This plate places Black Louisiana in the national education geography: the benchmarks below are the published national attainment figures for Black adults, and Louisiana's distribution figures — 1.55 million Black residents, 33 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
For Louisiana, the national attainment figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. For Black adults aged 25 and over, the Census Bureau's surveys record a population that has reached near-parity in high school completion while remaining well behind national rates in college completion: about 89 percent hold a high school diploma or higher, and about 25 percent — one in four — hold a bachelor's degree or higher. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Louisiana's households on the other.
In Louisiana, that national attainment pattern meets a state school and college system of its own, and the table below fixes the population it describes. At the first step, high school completion, Black adults stand at about 89 percent, close to the national figure of about 90 percent — a convergence that is historically recent and remarkable, given that as late as the mid-twentieth century a majority of Black adults had not completed high school. At the third step, the bachelor's degree, the Black figure of about 25 percent separates from the national figure of about 36 percent and the non-Hispanic White figure of about 39 percent. Held against the national ladder, Louisiana's own rows say where its attainment stands.
The attainment ladder reads locally in Louisiana: the state rows below give the population whose schooling this national pattern frames. Placed alongside the other groups the Census Bureau reports, the bachelor's-degree ordering reads: Asian adults at roughly 57 percent, non-Hispanic White adults at 39 percent, all adults at 36 percent, Black adults at 25 percent, and Hispanic adults at about 21 percent. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Louisiana; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Louisiana; the benchmark rows are the published national attainment record, labeled as benchmarks. In Louisiana, attainment is a stock built over decades, so the national pattern changes slowly — and the size of the state's Black adult population is what turns that pattern into local classrooms, colleges, and workforces.
The Population Behind the Plate
In Louisiana, that national attainment pattern meets a state school and college system of its own, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Louisiana holds about 1.55 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly one in three of its people, with Black alone at about 1.46 million, or 31 percent. Read against the table, the broad pattern settles into the specific numbers that belong to Louisiana.
For Louisiana, the national attainment figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. The state's Black geography divides into three regions. Below, the table's rows belong to Louisiana, and there the general becomes particular.
For The Louisiana Education Plate, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 33%; Black share, alone or in combination: 33.2%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 1.55 Million. The plate states Louisiana's record beside its table and lets the record speak.
The record behind this plate of Louisiana is published, not estimated by this atlas: National Center for Education Statistics; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey educational attainment tables. Benchmark rows are labeled with their basis wherever they appear, so Louisiana is compared on one measure and one basis only.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Louisiana: Black residents, alone or in combination: 1.55 Million; United States benchmark — of Black adults hold a high school diploma or higher: 89%. The measures above and these together fix the population of Louisiana as this plate describes it — its size, its share, its standing nationally — and the text that surrounds them interprets them without rounding or extension beyond the source.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 33% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 33.2% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 1.55 Million |
| United States benchmark — of Black adults hold a high school diploma or higher | 89% |
| United States benchmark — of Black adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher | 1 in 4 |
Source: National Center for Education Statistics; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey educational attainment tables. Method: Figures are drawn from the published federal sources named on this page, for the geography named; tile shading bands the published Black population share into the five legend classes. Counts are rounded as published by the source agency, and national benchmark rows are labeled with the basis they are published on.