According to a report prepared by Bill Bishop, editor of the news site DailyYonder.com, Coffee County has seen more people going to college in the last 40 years, joining the rest of the country in what has been a massive increase in the number of adults who have earned college degrees. In 1970, 10.8 percent of those over 25 years of age had college degrees in Coffee County. By 2010, 19.0 percent of adults here had completed college. The percentage of adults with college degrees in Coffee County was less than the national average of 27.9 percent in 2010.
The number of adults in the United States with college degrees has nearly tripled since 1970, when only 10.7 percent of adults had graduated from college. But the percentage of adults with degrees in counties with small cities, such as Coffee County, while increasing, has generally fallen behind the proportion of college-educated residents in urban counties. The good news for rural America is that it has caught up in every other measure of education. Only 18.6 percent of the adult population in Coffee County had failed to graduate from high school in 2010. Nationally 15 percent of adults had not completed high school; in Tennessee, the rate was 17.5 percent.