Chicago

Education

As of 1995, 84 percent of Chicago metropolitan area residents had completed high school; 31 percent of males and 26 percent of females had completed a bachelor's degree.

The Chicago Public Schools District, the state's largest, operated 567 schools in the fall of 1996 when it enrolled 408,201 students. Close to 90 percent were minority students, mostly black (54 percent) and Hispanic (32 percent). The system employed 23,433 teachers, with a pupil/teacher ratio of 20 to one; support staff totaled 27,827. The school district has won national attention for its Stephen Decatur Classical School, an elementary school for gifted students, and also operates the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, which is located on a farm within the city boundaries. Chicago also has over 200 parochial schools and more than 100 secular private schools.

The University of Chicago, founded in 1891 and endowed by John D. Rockefeller, has a national reputation for excellence, in both the sciences and the humanities. Its research facilities include the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Argonne National Laboratory. The University of Illinois at Chicago offers bachelor's, master's, doctoral, and professional degrees to some 25,000 students. Chicago is also home to three Catholic universities: DePaul, Loyola, and Saint Xavier. The city has a variety of other institutions of higher learning, including Chicago City-Wide Colleges, Roosevelt University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine, Vandercook College of Music, and the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago.