Do you know which are the most diverse states in America in 2017?
The USA is the country of more than 325 million people. Therefore it’s not a surprise that is rich in diversity in every possible sense. After all, it’s not called “melting pot” for no reason. When we talk about diversity we can think of many things – different religions, ethnicity, educational level, race, social status, etc. However, people most often think about diversity in the sense of ethnicity. So, if this is your field of interest you should read our article about most ethnically diverse states in America. Moreover, we also researched about most ethnically diverse cities in America so that you can have a look at that one as well.
However, considering that many articles on the Internet already covered ethnic diversity topic, we chose to skip that. So, we did something more innovative and different. We started thinking, what else can be considered as the difference between the states? What are the most diverse states in 2017 and what are the least diverse states? According to the most of the research which counted American diversity by state, Hawaii was the most diverse one. Hawaii has a little over 1 million people. Nevertheless, it’s the synonym for diversity in every possible sense. How this state ranks on our list, you will see in the part that follows.
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To create our list of most diverse states in America in 2017, firstly, we took recommendations from the research made by Kaiser Family Foundation. They have measured racial diversity in every American state and ranked them in that manner. In the following text, we provided the percentage of race in each state. The level of education in each state was the second important factor for our ranking. Information about education is obtained from the Statistical Atlas. Then we compared the percent of the population of 25 and older who don’t have a high school diploma and the percentage of people with obtained bachelor’s degree. By summing those two values and by dividing the result by two, we got the average educational level for each state. The third parameter was the religion since it’s one of the crucial distinctive factors between people. The number of religious denominations for each country was calculated using the data from the Pew Research Center. Finally, we compared and overlapped those three rankings. The result was the list below that is ranked according to “diversity index” that we calculated for each state. Even though some suggestions showed that most geographically diverse states would be a better indicator of diversity, we thought it is something that each of us could check in their old Atlas that is probably snoring on the bookshelf. We searched for something more interesting, and the results are great! The list of most diverse states in America in 2017 goes from the least diverse state up to the most diverse one. Let’s begin.
