Rank States with New Web Profiles

Indiana leads the Midwest (and ranks fourth in the United States) in the net in-migration of students, while New Jersey ranks last nationwide with a net out-migration of 18,816. Idaho had the highest rate of patent filings (per 100,000 persons) in 2003, whereas California ranked first in sheer volume with 22,075 patents filed.

How do we know these things? Is it by painstakingly downloading the data from various federal and trade websites and then ranking in Excel — over and over and over again until the rankings are ready, just in time for new data to be released?

No, it all comes from the new States IN Profile component of STATS Indiana (www.stats.indiana.edu). Thousands of economic and demographic indicators are available on the Web, anytime you want them, greatly simplifying retrieval of a wide cross-section of comparative data. States IN Profile provides detailed profiles of each state and the District of Columbia, enhanced by a ranking feature that allows easy comparison on individual items for all states. STATS Indiana already provides county-by-county comparisons for all 3,141 counties in the nation through the USA Counties IN Profile component.

States IN Profile focuses on annual, quarterly and monthly indicators for the economy, education, income, population and workforce for each state. The Indiana Business Research Center, with support from the Indiana Department of Commerce, has expanded its already sizable economic and demographic database to include these state-level indicators. Custom Web output programming lets users easily view data and rankings for all states. Individual contacts were made with each and every source, resulting in a calendar of release dates and a set of metadata for each data set.

Unique to both States IN Profile and USA Counties IN Profile is the linked-rank feature. Users can click on the rank of a particular state for an indicator in any given table and instantly see the entire list of states ranked for that same indicator. In this way, one can identify a state’s peers or competitors. The rankings themselves are not the primary focus, of course, but they do provide geographic context and easy comparisons among the states. Confirmations and surprises are found when using States IN Profile:

  • Maryland and Alaska have the highest median wage for healthcare practitioner and technical jobs.
  • Hawaii ranks second in the nation for the percent of workers in unions (23.8 percent), after California (24.6 percent).
  • Tennessee had the most bankruptcies per 1,000 persons in 2003 (11 per 1,000).
  • Between 1999 and 2003, Texas, South Carolina, Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee had the largest growth in the value of exports (adjusted to 2003 dollars).

States IN Profile offers a consistently maintained and updated resource for such information, integrating data series from a variety of sources into one convenient location and with the added value of percentages, adjustment of dollars for inflation and, of course, rankings.

States IN Profile is the first step in Indiana’s push to develop a consistent and publicly accessible set of economic and demographic benchmarks for Indiana. And because our state is committed to public access to this information, anyone anywhere can take advantage of these comparative statistics for states and counties at www.stats.indiana.edu/topic/profiles.asp.