Beyond the Classroom: Socioeconomic and Community Factors Shaping Educational Attainment

Abstract

This study assesses the correlation between unemployment rate, poverty rate, median household income, broadband subscription, library visits, and education attainment to gain insight into the relationship between socioeconomic and community-level factors and education outcomes. The main research objective of this study is to see if these factors account for any disparities in education attainment between states between 2014 and 2024. A quantitative correlational research design was employed using state-level secondary data and examining the relationships using scatter plots, correlation analysis, multiple linear regression and diagnostic testing. The findings indicate that there is a positive association between median household income and library visits, and a negative association between poverty rate and educational attainment. Unemployment rate and library visits don’t have significant relationships with educational attainment. The results for broadband show a more complex picture: There is a positive simple correlation between broadband and educational attainment, but the regression coefficient is negative once other factors are entered. The outcome illustrates that there are interrelated economic, digital and public-resource influences on educational attainment. This research is a contribution to the existing research by considering correlated variables that are less frequently studied but are important to the study such as library visits and broadband subscription along with the commonly studied variables.