According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of U.S. students graduating with a degree in data science has grown substantially in recent years, going from fewer than 100 in 2020 to more than 800 in 2022. And about 6,000 U.S. college students graduated with a degree in statistics in 2022, up from about 4,500 in 2020 and 3,600 in 2018 (no data are available for data science degrees in 2018).
While it is encouraging to see increases in the number of college students graduating with data skills, these numbers are only a tiny fraction of the millions of people who graduated from college during those years. By themselves, a few thousand data scientists and statistics graduates won't move the needle much on data literacy.
More encouraging, perhaps, is the 17 percent of high school seniors in 2019 who took at least one statistics course in high school (for college students, approximately 30 percent of undergraduates took at least one statistics course based on 2017 data; the years are different for high school and college because the data sources are different). But that is far less than the approximately 85 percent of 2019 high school seniors who completed advanced algebra, or the 40 percent who completed precalculus.
What Is Data Literacy?
Data literacy refers to the ability of people to understand, interpret, analyze and use data that they encounter in the world. It is a vital skill in our increasingly data-driven world.
The Value of Data Literacy
There’s certainly a case to be made that, for typical students, unless they’re going on to become engineers, basic knowledge of how to understand and perform data analysis is likely to be considerably more useful than learning the formulas that describe parabolas and hyperbolas in an advanced algebra class. Even so, I was unable to find any evidence of a university program that required data science for undergraduate degrees, even for engineering or science majors.
There’s already some evidence that a college education helps some people with data literacy. In a survey of more than 1,000 American adults that NORC conducted in June 2024, 67 percent of respondents who had graduated college said they were extremely or very capable of understanding and using statistics, nearly twice as many as the 37 percent of high school graduates who never went to college. But even among college students, about one in three felt they lacked competency in understanding statistics.
The point is not simply that we need to increase the percentage of students who take a single data science or statistics class to fulfill a requirement. We need to rethink what we teach — in college and earlier — to create a foundation of data literacy for future citizens. No college would dispute that every student should graduate with a competency in expository writing and basic mathematics. Why are there no requirements that our students achieve basic data literacy? Learning to appropriately evaluate data appears to be an essential basic competency that colleges and universities have neglected.
The Foundations of Data Literacy Start Early
And we shouldn’t limit our goals to college students. In K through 12 education, data science should be built into the curriculum and integrated into the teaching of basic math, science and finance. To have a data-literate population, we need to develop data skills far earlier in the educational experience, especially since a large portion of the population does not go to college. We need to focus more time, attention and funding on creating data literacy in middle and high school students, regardless of whether they plan to attend college. This idea meshes nicely with the trend in K–12 education of requiring financial literacy courses in high school students, with state legislators increasingly recognizing that understanding finances is a much-needed real-world skill.
Interestingly, people who consider themselves more data savvy put a higher premium on these skills. Among people who say they are very or extremely capable of understanding statistics and data, 66 percent feel skills in data literacy are essential for high school students, versus only 39 percent among those who say they are not too or not at all capable.
People already intuitively know this, even if they haven't yet articulated it to their school districts. In the June 2024 NORC survey, 89 percent of respondents asserted that it was essential or important for students to graduate from high school with data literacy skills — a similar number to those who were in favor of requiring better-known skills like financial literacy, digital literacy, government literacy and media literacy. While teens were less enthusiastic about additional course requirements, one in three said that they would sign up for a data literacy class.
Importantly, classes aimed at developing basic data literacy will be useful every day, whether the student is assessing different measures of inflation relative to their personal experience, talking to a doctor about the odds of the effectiveness of a treatment, or understanding shifting attitudes as reflected in opinion polls. In other words, data literacy is an overarching analytic skill — not only is it intrinsically useful, but it enhances similar (and highly valued) skills like financial and media literacy.
Why Is Data Literacy Important?
As Steven Levitt, co-author of the bestselling book Freakonomics, said, “I believe that we owe it to our children to prepare them for the world that they will encounter — a world driven by data. Basic data fluency is a requirement not just for most good jobs, but also for navigating life more generally, whether it is in terms of financial literacy, making good choices about our own health, or knowing who and what to believe.”
To that end, he is a founder of a new coalition called Data Science 4 Everyone, whose aim is to “advance data science education so that every K–12 student is equipped with the data literacy skills needed to succeed in our modern world. Equitable access to data science education is an opportunity to open doors to higher education, high-paying careers, and an engaged community.”
I wholeheartedly agree with this proposition. I'd simply add that we also need to pay attention to the adult population, as well. Data skills are becoming so essential for successful navigation of our world, and as I have noted, most adults today feel that they lack essential data literacy. Fortunately, it appears that this need is starting to be addressed in the form of numerous continuing education classes and professional training in data science and basic data skills that have emerged over the past several years. When I first started developing the ideas for Fact Forward several years ago, there were very few such programs. This is an encouraging development.
Excerpted with permission of the publisher, Wiley, from Fact Forward: The Perils of Bad Information and the Promise of a Data-Savvy Society by Dan Gaylin. Copyright (c) 2025 by National Opinion Research Center, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and ebooks are sold.
