Texas ranks in bottom 10 in new study on the best- and worst-educated U.S. states

Despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent boast that Texas is a continued “leader in education success,” it ranks among the state’s least-educated states according to a new study.

Indeed, the Lone Star State landed at No. 41 in personal finance blog WalletHub’s latest Most & Least Educated States in America report. Researchers compiled the rankings by comparing states across 18 metrics, including average educational attainment, average university quality and achievement gaps between genders and races.

Just 84% of Texas residents hold a high school diploma, for example, which is well below the national average of 88%. Only California ranked worse in that category.

Texas also had the highest gender gap in educational attainment. Nearly 60% of all students enrolled in higher ed in the state are women.

The Lone Star State also ranked near the bottom in the percentage of its populace that holds associates degrees and bachelor’s degrees. Additionally, it landed in the lower half for average university quality.

The only metric in which Texas was slightly above average was the racial gap in educational attainment, where it ranked 24th.

The study comes as Abbott and other Texas Republicans continue to push ahead on a plan to siphon off state education funding to create a school-voucher system — something opponents argue will further erode education quality.

Passed by the Texas Senate last week, Senate Bill 2 would allocate $10,000 per child to eligible families who send their kids to private schools. The proposal still must pass the Texas House before it can become law.

Michigan State University Professor Joshua Cowen, who spent years studying the effects of school vouchers in other states, warned that such programs usually cause the general standard of education to decline.

States that passed voucher programs — Ohio, Indiana and Louisiana among them — have recorded dramatic drop-offs in test results, according to Cowen. His research blames the substandard educations offered by under-qualified public schools that sprout up to profit from vouchers.

“Those impacts on test scores in Louisiana and Ohio had roughly twice the effect that the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores and about the same size of what Hurricane Katrina did to test scores in Louisiana,” Cowen previously told the Current.

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This article appears in Feb 5-18, 2025.