To be exact, one would have to do a demographic analysis, of the specific portions of the population of the ages at which such diplomas were conferred, as it would be irrelevant from a realistic point of view to measure the population on whole bases if you were only concerned with people who were of the age to receive Kindergarten Diplomas between 1981 and 1991-- or whatever ages and a whatever kind of diploma. Thus these figures are not as precise as they could be, but still given the trends of population and education, it is obvious that a trend in one is not following the direction of the other. A further look at the US Census figures averaged below will be sufficient to inform you that previous generations that were measured had even greater growth rates than 10%, so that the number of people getting any specific degrees or diplomas in the following decades should have been going up even more. *** In the tables below, the first line shows the Base Year: or "The Year In Question" labeled "YEAR: ####" so if you want a chart based on 1980 as the base year, you simply search/find "YEAR: 1980" to find the relevant portions. Once you have located the table for "YEAR: ####" you can see comparisons of that year to any other year by looking up the year you wish to compare to in the left column. The SAMPLE comparison is 1991, presented below. You will note a ten year comparison looks like: year/1991 1991/year Growth% 1981 0.911285 1.097352 0.9031% This means a 1991 statistic would have to be shrunk to about 91% of its size to be relevant to a comparable 1981 statistic. On the other hand, and 1981 statistic would have to be enlarged, this time by about 10% to be useful in comparison to 1991. 1991 is the latest year for which we have "hard statistics" so a copy of that year is presented first for you immediate use, with year back to colonization following, starting with estimates for 2009 when the United States population should reach 300 million. You may note some fluctuations in these figures, because we used all reports from the major media and almanacs of the periods our researchers could find. If you have access to any figures which do not appear in the footnoted materials, please send them to us for inclusion in the next edition. We are also working on a database that will NOT show fluctuation patterns of this nature, which will be based on massaged figures presented at later dates by the Census Bureau. These will be an example of the difference between the figure we can expect on an entirely "here-and-now" basis, and those which we would probably not see about today's events until a decade or two have passed. ***BYEAR = BASE YEAR ***AYEAR = A YEAR IN COMPARISON TO THE BASE YEAR BASE YEAR: 1991 YEAR BYEAR/AYEAR AYEAR/BYEAR GROWTH% year/1991 1991/year Growth%