Investigating Residential Segregation Through Project-Based Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Rather than presenting information and narratives in our policy research classes, we have students investigate residential segregation. Our ideal is to have students investigate their own familiar geography through primary sources. Letting students find the data, debate definitions of segregation, and come to their own conclusions joins community engagement, civic awareness, and experiential learning. Our Policy Research class, refined over several semesters, requires students to work in teams, access census data, search at the tract level, construct definitions, engage in data visualization, and present to peers and the community. This active research into residential segregation is an effective way to engage with the community at the same time learning valuable research skills in finding, considering, verifying, and presenting facts.

Keywords:

• Active learning
• census data
• critical reflection
• critical thinking
• DEI
• project-based learning
• residential segregation
• team-based learning

Introduction

The United States’ legacy of legal housing segregation has gained more and more attention in recent years (Abraham 2021; Strand 2019; Rothstein 2017). Our Policy Research class is one way professors can structure a class to actively investigate residential segregation in any locale in the United States while actively engaging the class in research, writing, debating, and even civic participation. And while this policy research course and report are about residential segregation, the method can be applied to many, if not any, subject areas.

Our approach allows students to discover for themselves the contours of residential segregation in any geography. But the method we use is suitable for any project in the social sciences. This project-based learning platform removes the preaching and improves the reaching—letting students investigate, evaluate patterns, and present data visually. Participants in this course:

• Do a mix of classroom activities and out-of-class assignments.

• Work in teams (or not, as you wish).

• Gain access to the US Census and learn how to navigate it and its online data systems.

• Identify tract-level data and measures of equity and inclusion using governmental resources.

• Define and operationalize terms.

• Employ data visualization techniques.

• Present findings and obstacles regularly to peers, professor, and community participants.

This prescription is based on several semesters of successfully running a class on “Policy Research” involving graduates and undergraduates, a volunteer team of facilitators, and lots of time looking at census data.

That this course is project-based is as important as its subject matter. Pedagogs studying political science courses “find that courses that feature more active/interactive learning exhibit greater student growth in both efficacy and knowledge confidence, robust to model specification” (Jansa and Rigsmuth 2022). The students do the legwork. They must figure out what they need to know, how they will find the answers, and the best way to analyze the data. The students are in the driver’s seat of this project, and we are there to guide them through this process.

And, unlike so many of our other courses which prescribe civic engagement, this course is civic engagement as the reader will see. This is important given the finding of Mallinson and Cruz (2022) that cultivating civic involvement early in the university curriculum, prepares the way for future participation….”

We note too that Census data is an Open Educational Resource (OER) and thus affordable to any student with access to the internet. This is not unimportant given one researcher’s finding that “political science has not been attentive to textbook costs” and that “[d]espite the wide occurrence of introductory courses, and the increasing attention paid to student loan debt, the cost of the teaching materials for introductory courses has largely been ignored in political science.” (Brandle 2022, 555) Put differently, there is no downside to using a free, high quality, user-friendly resource. The students like the price and the real-world experience. Using original source material, rather than secondary or tertiary summaries and renditions, gets at the heart of scientific inquiry. It is desirable for graduate students, honor students, and just students.

Defining the topic and outcomes

Our course matter is predicated on the unfortunate reality that segregation still exists across the United States. More locally and for our purposes, residential segregation continues in our state (New Jersey), a seemingly liberal state with Constitutional, legislative, and several long-standing landmark decisions by the state’s Supreme Court driving anti-discrimination policies in towns and schools for many decades (Booker v. Board 1965; Jenkins v. Morris School District 1975). In addition, billions of dollars have been invested over decades to remedy one of the many consequences of residential segregation: unequal schooling (Abbott v Burke). Yet New Jersey’s town-scapes and schools remain stubbornly segregated. By one measure, New Jersey is sixth highest among all states in segregation of Black students (Orfield, Ee, and Coughlan 2017). As many as 50% of black students in New Jersey attend schools where less than 10% of their peers are white.

Complicating matters is that the public is generally unaware of the segregated environment in which they live and do not necessarily desire a change (Rutgers-Eagleton/FDU Poll 2019). And lest the reader think we put the cart before the horse, the question of what constitutes residential “segregation” is a key component of the policy research class. We leave it to the students to construct definitions of segregation and to operationalize those definitions in their research. This is in itself a robust, detailed, and sometimes fraught discussion among students. In addition, it leads us quickly away from the question of “who is to blame” to the more immediate task of exploring what it is, to what extent it exists, and what are its contours in various locales.

Defining outcomes

The outcomes we sought, or came to seek, after some experimental semesters, were that students can:

• Use with facility the Census and other primary and secondary governmental data sources as a tool for teaching critical thinking skills, civic engagement and the value of diversity.

• Engage in the higher orders of Blooms’ Taxonomy to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate.

• Use multiple variables, data sources and methods to consider whether, in what ways, and how well-integrated towns have advantages over other towns.

We also sought to have students truly engaged in the learning project, produce original work, and to contribute to a body of knowledge on this phenomenon.

Enlisting help

Recruited to the project were two members of the local community who were accomplished researchers, engaged with public issues, and semi-retired. These individuals brought their perspective on current history and politics to the class. They were happy to work with students individually and with teams, multiplying exponentially the ability of the faculty to engage and encourage student teams and their work. They were happy to do this because the inquiry itself was of keen intellectual interest to them. Project-based learning is a magnet for those who want to investigate the project too.

We were also lucky that Richard Rothstein, author of the critically acclaimed book The Color of Law (2017) agreed to speak with the class gratis. In addition, we were privileged to have Paul Tractenberg, lead counsel on many of New Jersey’s school funding challenges, present to our class without cost. This was powerful because the students were keenly aware of the engagement of these researchers in our project. Our conclusion is that people deeply engaged in consequential public questions are eager to share their passion with a new generation.

Class methodology: The “how to” in examining segregation

To begin the course, we provide students with some conceptual understanding for the research project. We find that context is necessary for students to generate their own ideas, find research direction, and engage early on in evaluation. Students are prepared through a variety of assigned readings and short presentations to engage in conversations about critical questions, including the following:

• To what extent is segregation the product of freely made individual choices of where to live, social discrimination by individual actors, governmental policy at the federal, state and/or local level, or all of the foregoing?

• To what extent was residential segregation created or reinforced by public policy decisions and public actors?

• Is de jure segregation (through governmental action of the federal, state and local governments) or de facto segregation still present today?

• What are the direct consequences of segregation, from both an individual and societal perspective?

Getting started

After providing this contextual background, we move to defining (with specificity) the contours of residential segregation. Since this is the heart of our project, students must feel connected to our research question. Ideally, we wish them to identify a personal connection to the impact of residential segregation on their life and/or values in any respect. We want them to reflect critically, relating the phenomenon and our group inquiry to their own lives, family, histories, and future choices. We ask them to explore what segregation, desegregation, and integration mean and whether their own town, schools, dorms, academic programs, and the university are segregated or integrated – or something else. If so, or if not, how do they know?

We share what we hope to accomplish over the course of the current semester and identify what is our goal for this research. Note the project in any given semester changes as students develop new lines of inquiry, examine different municipalities and jurisdictions, or pass on their achievements to new students to develop, or re-register and continue in the course.¹ Over the past semesters, we have refined our research questions and currently focus on the following: Does residential segregation exist in New Jersey and if so, where, how do we know, how can we measure it, and why does it persist? Similarly, how can we measure the integration, equity and inclusion of towns? And are there genuinely integrated towns in the state?

Once the project is launched, the students, with close guidance, work together to figure out how they can acquire the knowledge to answer this research question. We develop a loose plan – a skeletal plan, but also recognize that a project like this works best with some fluidity – to allow it to grow or move in a different direction if needed.

Over several semesters, our project developed, unforeseen, into several stages.

Defining the good v the bad

Before the students have reviewed any data, the students are asked to define “segregation,” “desegregation,” and “integration”. It quickly becomes evident that these terms are not easily defined (Rich 2009; Ellen, O’Regan, and Horn 2012; Sin and Krysan 2015; Wong 2014; Parents v. Seattle School District 2007). Students consider: What is the good? Should our definition of integration focus exclusively on Black and White or multiracial integration? Should we use a concrete numerical definition to define integration such as 10–50%? And what should we use as a spatial comparison when defining segregation or integration?

To demonstrate this challenge, students are placed into groups of four or five students. The students are tasked with arriving at a collective definition of segregation and integration and assigning some rationale for their developed definitions. This encourages students to think critically and challenge each other and any preconceived notions. Thereafter, the groups are provided with a random assortment of New Jersey towns and given the demographic breakdown of these towns. Then, using and defending their own definitions, students must analyze whether their assigned towns can be considered segregated or integrated. This practical exercise allows students to apply their definitions and understanding to real-life examples. Students are often surprised by the complexity of this assignment and their findings. They struggle with operationalizing their definitions and are often shocked to find that a town they thought was diverse is not integrated. Students are also surprised by the dearth of integrated towns in New Jersey.

Mastering the Census

In the next stage of research, students begin using Census data to examine the racial breakdown of the 565 municipalities in the 21 counties in New Jersey. They learn to access and navigate the site, consider the many choices offered by the site including contemplating the optimal data set,² appreciate the many dimensions of the Census data, think and talk about what variables might be relevant, and explore how race and ethnicity are defined for purposes of the Census. Most students, whether graduate or undergraduate, have never been on the US Census site, and yet quickly appreciate the treasure trove of self-descriptors it contains.

Here we must emphasize neither the professor, nor the community members, nor the students had any facility with navigating the Census website. This was learned collectively. But better, we reached out to the Bureau of Census which put us in touch with a specialist in data dissemination who lives locally. This employee became a resource, answering questions from the class by email and eventually meeting a class. (Who says government is not responsive?) In subsequent semesters we became more adept at navigation, adding new variables to our analyses, and narrowing our geographic unit of analysis to the census tract.

For our lines of inquiry, we focused primarily on Black and White populations (Ellen 2001), putting to the side other non-white populations for several reasons: First, historical discrimination specifically targeted the Black population; Second, other researchers have focused on Black/White segregation. Ingrid Ellen (2001) explains that the focus on Black and White integration is necessary because Hispanics and Asians, especially those in the middle class, are typically much less racially segregated from other races than African Americans. Similarly, Meghan Ashlin Rich’s study (2009), examining the contours of integration within a neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, also focuses on Black/White integration. Other non-white populations have experienced more assimilation in white geographies. And all this is, as it turned out, supported by New Jersey data which shows the Black population is more isolated than other non-white groups.

We also devised a numerical standard based on the degree of deviation from the statewide demographic breakdown, which in New Jersey’s case, is quite similar to the national breakdown. Although the parameters and focus of our study varied slightly from class to class, we generally considered a town integrated if it met the following factors:

• The Non-Hispanic Black population was between 6.5% and 40%;

• The Hispanic population was 20% or less;

• The total population is equal to or greater than 10,000.

Ellen, O’Regan, and Horn (2012) explains that “We require the presence of White residents because White remains the dominant race in our society, and historically it is White individuals who have excluded or have avoided living near members of minority groups. Thus, although a community with Black, Hispanic, and Asian residents might be highly diverse, we do not consider it to be integrated. Rather, we classify it as mixed minority” (37).

We assigned to small groups of students different clutches of municipalities and asked them to drill down to see the racial composition of the tract-level of these municipal units, but also to look at other variables. (Students learn that Census tracts are smaller statistical clusters of counties and towns with roughly 2,500–8,000 individuals each. Frequently, census tracts coincide with a small town or the wards of a city.) Students use the census tracts to analyze residential segregation within neighborhoods of the town.

Looking for change, 1980–2019

Critically analyzing towns for residential housing quickly led to the question of what changes the state had experienced over the past several decades. Students conducted a thorough examination of Census data from 1980, 2000, 2010 and 2019 to look at changing racial residential patterns in every single one of the state’s 564 towns. Students also worked collaboratively to define what constitutes a stably integrated town. Was there a certain percentage change that would indicate that a once-integrated town was now segregated? How much change was there, in fact, over the decades? Students looked at various different methodologies and had to decide what made “sense” with their data. Most groups followed the leading experts and determined that a town was stable if it did not experience more than a 10% change over 10 years. (For example, Rich (2009) concludes “an integrated neighborhood can be defined as stable when there are equal numbers of blacks and whites in a neighborhood in a given year as in past years,” that is, if the percentage of whites in a neighborhood today is similar to the percentage 10 years ago, then it can be said that there is not a significant amount of racial transition occurring. But how similar must the percentage be from year to year? Ellen (2001) utilizes the standard set by Lee and Wood (1990), which asserts a “neighborhood is stable if its Census tracts do not experience more than a 5% change in the proportion of Blacks within them.” And because Ellen uses decennial censuses in her study, she increases the threshold to a 10% change for her definition of racial stability. Our students’ studies generally considered a municipality racially stable if the percent change in any racial category was equal to or less than 15% from 2000 to 2019.

A focus group project

We added a stage to our semester-by-semester class to build on our project. In fact, this is one of the advantages of project-based teaching and learning: the class need not repeat itself. Every semester can build on prior accomplishments. Some students will repeat the research course for credit. Others are happy to brief the new students in the course. Focus Groups were not originally conceived as part of the project but seemed a logical next step. What did people think in towns that were, at least, statistically integrated? What did people think in towns that were not? Was there a secret sauce? And our students were exposed to a whole new dimension of research.

With our team of student and community participants we planned three structured focus groups with people from three different kinds of towns: towns we had identified with highly concentrated White populations, towns with highly concentrated Black populations, and towns we had identified as Integrated. All participants were non-Hispanic Black and at least 18 years old. The purpose was to get a high-level qualitative sense of ideas and to generate hypotheses around several questions crafted by the class:

1. What do Black respondents consider an ideal racial mix and is this ideal mix dependent on whether participants live in a highly concentrated White/Black town or a well-integrated town?

2. Does the public’s perception of integration depend on where they live?

3. Why do people end up living where they do?

4. What do the participants consider as some factors that contribute to well-integrated towns?

Students participated or led in every step of this process but two. They helped to design the structure of the focus groups, identify the towns, develop the questions that would be discussed in the focus groups, and cold call prospective participants. (We attempted to use a student as moderator, though after much discussion and training decided not to. We used a professional who was Black and familiar with the project. Also, the professors of record made the application to the University’s IRB.)

With the help of a moderator, a team conducted three focus groups, each with four to six participants from 18 non-overlapping New Jersey towns. The towns were selected based on their racial demographics, population, and geographic location: (1) highly concentrated White towns; (2) highly concentrated Non-Hispanic Black towns; and (3) a well-integrated town. Residents were qualified to participate if they were non-Hispanic Black, 18 or older, and had a child in the public-school system in their town. Having 18 individuals from 18 different towns followed best practices in focus group methodology by protecting the privacy of participants and allowing a fluidity and openness of conversation that could be lost if people knew each other prior to participation. (Sim and Waterfield 2019)

For a small fee, a private company provided names and phone numbers of registered voters in the 18 towns we identified. Now the students took over the recruitment, calling potential respondents from a closed space, deleting the names and phone numbers of potential participants who declined or failed the screening, securely emailing, then deleting, the names of the participants who agreed to be included in the study to the principal investigator. The moderator took over at this point to get consent from potential participants and to explain the process. The interviews were conducted by Zoom. Only the moderator was permitted to communicate to the participants. Others could observe but not participate. The sessions were recorded, and transcripts made.

Reading through the transcripts, we collectively made these observations:

Participants in all three focus groups generally recognized the importance of diversity in their local communities and the benefits of an integrated town. Respondents gave varying reasons as to why integration matters, with several participants noting the perceived benefits for their children and desire to expose them to different races and cultures. For example, an individual in an Integrated town noted that “… when I moved here, I was very happy because a lot of my neighbors are African American, which I want my children to grow up with African American friends, but the benefit is that there are also a lot of other people.” Even though more people in the Integrated group stated their preference for a diverse community, it is worth noting that individuals in both highly concentrated White and Black towns stated that they, too, prefer diversity in their neighborhoods.

The biggest takeaway from the three focus groups was the distinction recognized between diversity and equity and inclusion. The participants in all three focus groups felt very strongly that integration must mean more than the simple numbers and must include measurable factors of inclusion. This was most apparent in statements and observations made in the second focus group representing Integrated towns, where the conversation was mostly centered around the idea inclusion (but was mentioned in all three focus groups).

• An individual from an integrated town criticized the lack of Blacks in educational leadership positions, asking: “How can you have all these children of different races, but you do not have teachers, supervisors, athletic teachers of the same color?”

• An individual in a concentrated White town said that the town workforce is integrated, but the senior positions are not.

• Similarly, a participant from a concentrated Black town noted: “It’s about those things, and that would show that it’s an integrated community, looking at the student population, looking at the businesses, and not just seeing other cultures owning businesses, but also seeing our own.”

• Another person in a concentrated Black town commented that: “…it would be good for my daughter to see someone like her in positions. Whether it’s a police officer, a doctor, a teacher, to see someone like herself, and not just see everyone else, to know that her culture, her race, they are more than capable of doing the same things, and to see it personally.”

After reviewing the focus group transcripts, students quickly saw that we needed to look at more than numbers. Diversity speaks to the percentage of various groups in a community: e.g., Black, White, and Hispanic. But those percentages do not tell us anything about inclusion in a community, even if the community is diverse. Similarly, the single dimension of diversity does not tell us about the access various groups have to resources. To measure equity, might we ask if everyone has an equal chance of testing “proficient” in reading and math in high school? What is the difference in median income based on race? Measuring these in a town might offe a more complete view than any one-dimensional measure of diversity.

Looking at the racial equity and inclusion within integrated towns

This led to a new stage of research. Students applied new factors to measure the racial equity and inclusion within these towns, e.g.: median income, educational attainment, and a racial breakdown of public-school administrators, teachers, and the police force. Students had to collect the data, which was in fact available for the relevant towns (i.e. highly concentrated White, Black and integrated), focusing on the new indicators. They had to examine the similarities and differences with their previous findings. And as their final project and the culmination of their research, students had to present their findings. Students’ final presentations were expected to be structured and comprehensive, clearly explaining their conclusions over the course of the semester. Visualizations were encouraged and data analysis expected.

Throughout this project, students learned the importance of data literacy, using Census data and other primary sources to draw meaningful conclusions. Students were able to tangibly see the segregation in their state and communities and had to decide how to define what is good, bad, and why. Once the students identified diverse communities, they considered whether this was enough - did the numbers tell the full story? –which led to the final part of the research, a look at factors related to equity and inclusion. The entire project was placed in the context of history, with students exploring how governmental policies contributed to these racial patterns and how governmental actions attempted to remedy the situation.

Collateral benefits

• Lessons Learned

  This research project had a profound effect on the student researchers, improving their analytical skills, their debate skills, and greatly broadening their awareness of this issue. With a large proportion of students living in New Jersey, it deepened their understanding of their local neighborhoods, opened their eyes to the positives and negatives of their communities and stimulated ideas for policy change. Students learned critical thinking skills, data interpretation and the relationship between history and today’s landscape. Students commented as follows (Sloan 2021)

  • “The things that I found were just so insane.”

  • “I had this privilege where I actually didn’t have to think about it and actually seeing the numbers and reading them, it’s really disheartening to see all of this.”

  • “I feel guilty for having not learned about it earlier and doing more about it.”

  • “What was actually shocking was the numbers and seeing the breakdown of how many (towns) have zero percent Black residents - That’s what was shocking.”

  • “[Residents are not being] told that racial segregation is a huge issue in New Jersey and that residential segregation is something that still exists. It’s something that they’re not exposed to—even state legislators. It’s not something that’s talked about nearly enough. It gets swept under the rug a lot.

  • “I feel if we had more discussions about it—which I hope this class will result in—and have more people care about state issues, especially residential segregation, we may make some headway.”

  • “I personally just believe that it’s really important for students to interact with people with different backgrounds.”

• Collaboration within the University

  In parallel with our Policy Research class, the University’s survey research group undertook to add a short question series to its public polls about perceptions of segregation. The question series was added to a national poll, several statewide polls, and even a poll in the state’s largest city, Newark. The series explored to what extent people think their neighborhoods, towns and schools are segregated by race, to what extent they believe they have “diversity,” and whether they desire change, and in what direction (Rutgers-Eagleton/FDU Poll 2019). This was a bonus to the collaboration of the students and with two community members.

• Mastery

  It was a basic part of the course to get students to use Census data, but it was a pleasure to watch students over weeks and weeks gain mastery of the site and its possibilities, and to take pleasure in that mastery. Similarly, while some students were familiar with data visualization techniques, and many others struggled, they all gained satisfaction from their unique presentations of the towns assigned to them.

• Self-Gratification

  There is little more gratifying for a professor than students propelled by their own curiosity in a subject. We intended to have active learning. We intended to have peer interaction. But actually achieving it was a thrill.

• Grants

  The work of the class was also interesting enough for a major corporation to offer financial support. PSEG gave $25,000 to help support focus groups, some polling, a software subscription to Social Explorer, and overload pay.

• Social Explorer is an application that interacts with Census data to produce rich visualizations. It offers interactive maps in times series at detailed levels and allows the export of data to other applications such as XL, R and Stata. The class used Social Explorer primarily as a tool to show racial composition of specific geographic units. It greatly facilitated the mapping of residential segregation and let students discover for themselves patterns of segregation in New Jersey, in its municipalities and in its census tracts. Acquisition of Social Explorer and learning how to use it is another example of how the course evolved over several semesters. When we first planned the course, we were not aware of this software. Climbing Over Walls

  Students’ work was impressive enough to invite one to present some of the work at a monthly Faculty Colloquium – where normally it is the faculty who present. One student who completed her Master of Public Administration and graduated, nonetheless joined faculty to present a workshop on “Teaching Residential Segregation” at the American Political Science Association’s Teaching and Learning Conference.

• Surprise Bonus

  The work of this class was interesting enough to bring a call from a CBS News reporter. In a casual conversation someone had mentioned to a journalist that students were engaging in this work. That reporter had an interest, pitched it to the editor, and showed up to interview the faculty and students (Sloan 2023).

For further discussion

The approach is admittedly not unique in each of its constituent parts. Advocates of project-based teaching and learning are advocates because they think it more efficacious. Using government data bases is not unique, though many classes don’t make use of them. Allowing students to draw their own conclusions based on their own definitions and their own research is far from unusual and, in fact, a gold standard of much teaching. Using data visualization, again, is not unique but in this course how to visualize data is married to presenting one’s original research in the best and clearest light.

The approach is unusual if not unique because it links together in a perfectly comfortable combination a critical and controversial societal problem with team-based learning with replicable hands-on research with unavoidable critical thinking with data visualization. The course can be disassembled and reassembled, we think, to accommodate different societal problems, different databases, and different levels of students. Consider too that in the current era of woke and anti-woke, DEI and anti-DEI, there was no pushback from students. We think that is because, as we said at the start, a project-based learning platform removes the preaching and improves the reaching—letting students define terms, investigate, evaluate patterns, and present data. Students consult with their peers. While the professor provides resources for definition of terms, those definitions are not imposed. Students develop workable definitions for terms, not the professor: segregation, integration, diversity, equity, inclusion. Students decide what is a positive outcome, how it is measured, and what to conclude. The professor is facilitator and, when asked, mentor.

This particular project was an investigation of residential segregation at the municipal level in a particular state. But the method lends itself to many disciplines and an infinite number of research paths. Professors thus can: identify a societal phenomenon (that suits their own research interest), provide students with context, allow the students to frame questions and definitions; choose appropriate databases, recruit community participants to help support the teams, have students construct data visualization, have them present to their peers, ask them to identify the next steps in research.

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to Peter Shapiro, a Harvard grad, former county executive of New Jersey’s most urbanized region, a major-party nominee for Governor, and an analytical whiz, for his invaluable leadership in this multi-semester project. He died in late March 2024. Our thanks to Dale Russakoff, formerly a journalist for The Washington Post, and author of the New York Times best-seller The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools. We also thank Angela Xhakolli who graduated with a Master of Public Administration, served as a mentor to our undergraduate students, and presented at the American Political Science Association Teaching and Learning Conference. Finally, David Kraiker of the Bureau of the Census helped students and professor to navigate the Census site and identify variables.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Public Service Enterprise Group Foundation under grant title “Integration in New Jersey.”

Notes

1. The course is set up with the Registrar so that students can take it multiple times for credit. We can do this because the research project changes each semester. Moreover, students who have taken the course previously become mentors of the new students.

2. Until 2000, the Census conducted both a long and short-form survey. One in six families was selected to complete the long form which included more in-depth questions concerning topics such as transportation, housing, and education. This form was replaced by the American Community Survey. The American Community Survey (ACS) is distributed to about 3.5 million people annually (1% of the US population). The survey asks about a variety of topics. As explained by the Census Bureau, through the ACS, “we know more about jobs and occupations, educational attainment, veterans, whether people own or rent their homes, and other topics. Public officials, planners, and entrepreneurs use this information to assess the past and plan the future.” The Census tells the number of people and the ACS tells how these people live. The Census Bureau also releases 5-year ACS data which are “period” estimates that represent data collected over a period of time. The primary advantage of using this multiyear estimate is the increased statistical reliability of the data for those areas that are less populated and have small population subgroups.r