Census deja-vu all over again

A couple of News Journal colleagues and I drove to American University in Washington, D.C., yesterday for an IRE workshop on the census. It was a long day (up at 5 a.m. and home about 9:30 p.m.), but it was a good trip.

I already knew a lot of the nuts and bolts of the census release. But I picked up several useful tips about the questions on the American Community Survey, the use of margins of error and some of the features on American FactFinder. It's all going to come in handy in a couple of months when the data start rolling in.

The last couple of hours of the workshop were spent talking about story ideas that we can do from the ACS and the Census 2010 data. I filled a sheet of paper with possible ideas, which I hope to tick off over the next several months. Maybe I won't get to all of them, but I'll try.

Several times during the day, I had the feeling I had seen this whole movie before. I remember sitting in a lecture hall at, I think, University of Maryland almost exactly 10 years ago and learning a lot of the same things. Back then, we were all obsessed with what to do with the multi-race question. In the end, it turned out to be only a minor issue because fewer than 2 percent of the population checked off more than one race. It will probably be a higher percentage this time around, though.

Gonna be fun.

Brainy Delawareans

When I came to Delaware a decade ago, several people told me that the state -- or maybe it was New Castle County -- had the nation's highest percentage of people with advanced academic degrees.

It sounded plausible. Delaware has a reputation of being a home to scientists, inventors, bankers and lawyers.

Alas, it isn't true. The latest numbers from the American Community Survey show Delaware ranks 11th, with 11.4% of adults holding advanced degrees. Massachusetts ranks first, with 16.4%. If you really want to be around a bunch of educated people, go to Washington, D.C., where 28% of adults have advanced degrees.

The claim isn't true for New Castle County, either; about 13.7 percent of its adults have advanced degrees. That's still higher than the national figure of 10.3% but far below the 23.8% in Middlesex County, Mass., home of Harvard and MIT.

Paradise has its price

I can't stand the show, but my wife likes to watch House Hunters on HGTV. If you've never seen it, each half-hour show profiles a couple while they're shopping for a house. They look at three houses and then decide. (I'm sure they look at lots more houses, but the show only follows them as they look at three.)

House-buying is one of life's biggest headaches, if you ask me. I like living in a house, I like working on my house, I take pride in my house. But buying it is just a big chore, and I don't know why anyone would want to watch a TV show about it. Might as well have a TV show called "The Root Canal Hour."

That said, it was on the other night, and the profiled couple was looking at houses in Hawaii. I was shocked at the prices -- $900 grand for a shabby little thing!

So this article from Pacific Business News caught my eye. It confirms what I saw on House Hunters: Hawaii has nation's highest property values.

The article, based on the latest American Community Survey data, says the median value of a home in Hawaii is $517,600. Guess that's the price of living in paradise.

Delaware ranks 14th in that list, with a median home value of $249,400. That's more than six times the price of my first house, but seeing the price of Hawaii's houses takes a little bit of the sting out of it all.

The cheapest place to live is West Virginia. It has a median home value of $94,500. Little pink houses for you and me.