70% of Americans don't have college degree, Rick Santorum says

Rick Santorum, a potential candidate for president in 2016, argues that the Republican Party is not offering enough for America’s workers. The former senator from Pennsylvania said Republicans need to improve in reaching out to these voters on CBS’s Face the Nation on April 5, 2015.

"I think people are looking for someone to bring us together. And I put a book out last year called Blue Collar Conservatives, and it's the whole idea that we have to start bringing those who are being left behind by this economy. We have to give them an opportunity to be able to reach that American dream again. And I think Republicans, frankly, have been very weak on that," Santorum said.

After mentioning that Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, did not do a great job in reaching out to the working class, Santorum added:

"I think there's a lot of folks who are very disenchanted with both political parties because neither party is really talking about them and really saying what's the way forward for the 70 percent of Americans who don't have a college degree but, you know, want economic opportunity like everybody else and nobody's talking about that."

We wondered whether Santorum is correct that 70 percent of Americans don’t have a college degree.

We checked with Santorum’s staff of his organization Patriot Voices, and they sent us an article from Vox about Scott Walker’s lack of a college diploma. The reporter argues that not having a college degree does not really matter since "most Americans — nearly 70 percent — don't have a bachelor's degree, either." The article doesn’t give a source for its number.

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We decided to look for data about educational attainment from the U.S. Census Bureau; we found 2014 data (the most recent available) on the U.S. population by age, race and gender. We focused on the age group of 25 years and over, because most American students graduate by the time they turn 25.

According to census data, 209.3 million people in the United States are 25 years old or older, and 66.9 million have a bachelor’s degree or higher (such as a master’s, professional or doctoral degree). That means about 68 percent of them do not have a bachelor’s degree.  If we include people who have an academic associate degree -- about 11.7 million people -- the percentage of people without a degree declines slightly, to 62 percent.

The U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics looked at the same question in a 2014 longitudinal study that followed young people to age 27. It found that by that age, 72 percent of respondents did not have bachelor's degrees. 

Our ruling

In making the point that Republicans need to reach out to the working class more, Santorum said that 70 percent of Americans don’t have a college degree. We found several measures that are close to the number Santorum cited. Overall, we rate his claim True.

Correction, Apr. 14, 2015: We rated this statement True, but due to a production error, we initially published our fact-check with a logo that mistakenly indicated that we had rated it Mostly True. We have fixed that logo. In addition, we have updated the math from our original version to include people who have a higher degree above a bachelor’s. The new data doesn’t change the rating, which remains True.