How many students between ages of 5 and 18 in the USA?

March 26, 2021 6:42 AM

How would I find out how many students (kids) between the ages of 5 and 18 years old are in the USA?

Is there a commonly available resource (besides Google) I can use to answer this question? In addition to wanting to know the answer of how many students there are, I work with students and would like to introduce research resources to students.

posted by Mike Mongo to Education (9 answers total)

Around 56,000,000. See link to National Center of Education Statistics
posted by multivalent at 6:50 AM on March 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

So, Google is an index of websites that allows you to search through the results. You could use a different search index, but knowing how to google questions is an important life skill!

I would think it'd be valuable to teach skills on how to google things.

Like, instead of googling, "how many students between ages of 5 and 18 are in the USA" I would google "how to get accurate population data usa" then "USA Census information visualized age group" or "USA census download data"
posted by bbqturtle at 6:51 AM on March 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

The US Census has this information on its QuickFacts sheet here. You'll have to calculate it out, but of the estimated 328 million people in the US, 22.3% are under 18 and 6% are under 5. So ~73 million are under 18 but we subtract the ~19 million who are under 5, which gives us ~54 million.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 6:54 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

It took several tries, but I found this Wolfram Alpha query that worked.
posted by steveminutillo at 6:58 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Wikipedia is the best resource for this, bc it has both the information and its sources. It also has breakdowns for primary and secondary enrollment, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States

This way, you/they can both learn the stats you want, as well as what high-quality reliable sources they were obtained from.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:00 AM on March 26, 2021

When I couldn't figure out how many deployed military there were I called the Boston Public Library and they got me the answer in an hour. But that was pre covid and I don't know if libraries are doing that for people these days.
posted by InkaLomax at 7:09 AM on March 26, 2021

A Duck Duck Go search of how many k-12 students are there in the US yielded multiple reliable links that agree with the numbers given above.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 7:09 AM on March 26, 2021

For these kinds of questions, I would recommend looking at the topical Federal Statistical Agency. For education-related topics, that would be the National Center for Education Statistics (example resource).
posted by oceano at 7:29 AM on March 26, 2021

The Census Bureau is a good resource as well. (ex #1, ex #2) .

Relatedly, you can give the Census Bureau (and other federal agencies) a call.
posted by oceano at 7:37 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]