While I was glancing at the latest America’s Health Rankings, I noticed that South Carolina had both the worst violent crime rate in the nation and the second-worst rate of high school graduation.
So how related to one another are those two factors? Here’s a simple X-Y chart, showing violent crime rates compared to high school graduation for all fifty states.
Violent crimes vs. percentage of 9th graders who graduate high school
While correlation is not the same thing as causation, this chart certainly suggests that more educated states have less problems with crime. That’s something to think about when it comes time to decide how much money to allocate to schools.