Census results change Ind. business, education

It’s no exaggeration: There were 6,483,802 Hoosiers on April 1, 2010.
 
This 6.6 percent increase in population from 2000 will change the way Hoosiers measure economic status and education needs.

On Dec. 21, the Indiana Business Research Center at the Kelley School of Business analyzed the recent data. They concluded that the growth rate is down from 9.7 percent during the 1990s, according to a press release.

“The result was notably more effective than in 2000, when students residing in campus housing tended to be undercounted,” IBRC director Jerry Conover said.

He said Indiana had the third highest census participation in the United States.

Conover said a head-count of a state helps legislators draw district lines, account for changes in public school systems and other infrastructural services and helps indicate economic conditions.

Though Indiana’s growth can be attributed to the strong economic situation in the upper Midwest during the 1990s, growth doesn’t make a state economically sound, demographer at the IBRC Matt Kinghorn said.

The relationship between economic status and census results is symbiotic. The economic status of a region has a major impact on census results, but the results can also change an area’s status.

“Businesses use census data to track where their markets are growing or shrinking in order to target their efforts more efficiently,” Conover said. “Retailers base store location decisions on census data showing how many people in the retailer’s target segment live nearby.”

Conover said the Census Bureau conducts censuses of businesses that are widely used to guide business-to-business marketing decisions.

Education is also a major factor that both contributes to census results and can be determined by them.

School districts also use census data to plan for new schools and expansion or closings of existing schools, Conover said.

Population growth is influenced by multiple factors, but Kinghorn has broken to natural increase and migration.

“The national increase in population comes from about 80 percent natural increases. Migration typically accounts for the rest and has variation,” he said. “Indiana’s growth was more due to migration.”