Mid-Michigan Ranked by College Degree Rates: How Does Your Zip Stack Up?

Every ten years, federal law requires the United States government to conduct a census of its residents.

The data that's collected is used for a myriad of things--from calculating each city, county and state's population, to monitoring growth within certain demographics, to determining how many seats each state is allotted in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The information also gives citizens an inside look at how their community compares with others in a seemingly endless number of categories, such as median income, cost of living, and mortgage to income ratios.  It also tracks things such as average household size, median age, and ethnicity.

We checked the statistics at Zipwho.com for every zip code in Ingham, Clinton and Eaton Counties and noted college degree rates in each area.

Given their proximities to Michigan State University, it wasn't surprising to see East Lansing and Okemos with some of the highest percentages of residents with college degrees. Among its seven zip codes, Lansing's rates varied widely--in fact, residents in one particular zip code are currently twice as likely to hold a college degree as those in the Lansing zip with the lowest rate.

Starting with the communities with the highest percentages of residents that hold a college degree and working our way down to those with the lowest percentages, here is the breakdown of what we found. We also included percentile rankings to use as comparison to zip codes across the United States.