Definition
The College Graduate Score indicates the likelihood that an individual graduated from a college or university with a Bachelor's degree. Individuals with a higher score are more likely to be a college graduate.
Technical Details
The model was built from multiple surveys where respondents indicated their highest level of completed education. The responses were mapped to the following common scale:
- Some high school or less
- High school diploma / GED
- Trade school or vocational training
- Some college or associate’s degree
- Bachelor’s degree
- Graduate or professional degree
Respondents who answered "Bachelor’s degree" or "Graduate or professional degree" are labeled as college graduates. Respondents who answered “Some high school or less”, “High school diploma / GED”, “Trade school or vocational training”, or “Some college or associate’s degree” were labeled as not college graduates.
The score was trained on about 21,000 survey responses collected by Murmuration from 2021 - 2023. The surveys used stratified random sampling to ensure national representativeness across age, race, gender, partisanship, education and geography.
The model was trained using gradient-boosted decision trees. Model features were drawn from the Atlas by Murmuration dataset, which includes demographic (age, race, gender, etc.), commercial, geographic, and vote history information for all registered voters nationally.
Scores range from 0-100, where higher scores indicate greater likelihood that a voter is a college graduate. The score represents the model's predicted probability (scaled to 0-100) that an individual has a Bachelor’s degree or higher.
We validated the model's accuracy using a held-out set of 4,142 polling respondents (20% of the original survey sample) whose data was not used during model development. Among individuals with scores in the top 20% of the College Graduate Score, 90% are actual college graduates—making them 74% more likely to be college graduates than the average voter.
Use Cases
The College Graduate Score can be used in a variety of ways when building a campaign strategy and planning voter engagement. It can also be used independently or in conjunction with other scores. Below are a few examples for how partners could use this score:
- Demographic Targeting: The College Graduate Score provides a reliable estimate of educational attainment at the individual voter level, which can be a valuable input for campaign strategy. Partners can use this score to identify and target college-educated voters, a demographic that has become increasingly influential in competitive races.
- Issue-Based Messaging: Education level is a strong predictor of which issues resonate with voters. Partners can use the College Graduate Score to tailor messaging on issues that tend to differ by educational attainment, ensuring the right message reaches the right audience. We recommend combining this score with issue support scores to identify voters who are both college-educated and engaged on a particular issue.
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the College Graduate Score nationally. Note: these score cutoffs may be different in your local districts.
| To target the top... | Set the minimum score value as... |
| 10% | 81 |
| 20% | 69 |
| 30% | 59 |
| 40% | 51 |
| 50% | 43 |
| 60% | 36 |
| 70% | 30 |
| 80% | 24 |
| 90% | 17 |
| 100% | 2 |