Seventy percent of Americans “don’t have a college degree.”
— Rick Santorum on Sunday during an interview on “Face the Nation”
Rick Santorum, a potential candidate for president in 2016, says the Republican Party is not offering enough for America’s workers. The former senator from Pennsylvania said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Republicans need to improve in reaching out to these voters.
“I think people are looking for someone to bring us together. And I put a book out last year called ‘Blue Collar Conservatives,’ and it’s the whole idea that we have to start bringing those who are being left behind by this economy. We have to give them an opportunity to be able to reach that American dream again. And I think Republicans, frankly, have been very weak on that,” Santorum said.
After mentioning that Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, did not do a great job in reaching out to the working class, Santorum added:
“I think there’s a lot of folks who are very disenchanted with both political parties because neither party is really talking about them and really saying what’s the way forward for the 70 percent of Americans who don’t have a college degree but, you know, want economic opportunity like everybody else, and nobody’s talking about that.”
We wondered whether Santorum is correct that 70 percent of Americans don’t have a college degree.
We checked with Santorum’s staff at his organization Patriot Voices, and they sent us an article from Vox about Scott Walker’s lack of a college diploma. The reporter wrote that not having a college degree does not really matter since “most Americans — nearly 70 percent — don’t have a bachelor’s degree, either.” The article doesn’t give a source for its number.
We decided to look for data about educational attainment from the U.S. Census Bureau; we found 2014 data (the most recent available) on the U.S. population by age, race and gender. We focused on the age group of 25 years and over because most American students graduate by the time they turn 25.
According to census data, 209.3 million people in the United States are 25 years old or older, and 42.3 million of them have a bachelor’s degree. That means about 80 percent of them do not have a bachelor’s degree. If we include people who have an academic associate degree — about 11.7 million people — the percentage of people without a degree declines slightly, to 74 percent.
The U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics looked at the same question in a 2014 longitudinal study that followed young people to age 27. It found that by that age, 72 percent of respondents did not have bachelor’s degrees.
Our ruling
In making the point that Republicans need to reach out to the working class more, Santorum said that 70 percent of Americans don’t have a college degree. We found one measure from the census that put the number a bit higher, around 80 percent, when considering only bachelor’s degrees. A different study from the U.S. Labor Department showed that about 72 percent of young people don’t have bachelor’s degrees. So different measures vary, but they are very close to the number Santorum cited.
Overall, we rate his claim True.
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