Colorado Case Study on Costilla vs. Boulder County

Trevor Jones
3/8/16
Per. 3

Colorado Case Study on Costilla vs. Boulder County 

During our Colorado Case Study Development project, we looked at a number of statistics in 7 different counties in Colorado to determine which county would need community service the most. From our research, we determined that Costilla county needs help for a few reasons. Through looking at the graphs we compared Costilla county and Boulder county, we can observe that costilla county is the county that is in need of the most help out of all the counties in colorado that we looked at. One of the four main reasons why we say this is they have one of the highest rates of unemployment. The rate of unemployment in costilla county is 5.6%, whereas in Boulder County the rate of unemployment is 2.6% which is lower than any of the other counties. Another reason for choosing Costilla county was due to their low median household income at $33,594. They had almost the lowest out of the counties that we looked at being only $1,000 ahead of Otero county. This puts them well below Boulder county whose median household income is at $90,197. Another contributor to why we chose to look at Costilla County was because of the large percentage of people in the county who are on food stamps; 19.5%. In Boulder county only 4.7% of the population is on food stamps. Costilla also has a very low Per Capita income at $20,592, and Boulder counties is at $37,947. In Costilla the poverty rate is also higher than Boulders. In Costilla the poverty rate is at 25.0% and Boulder’s at 14.6%. The High School graduation rate also differs greatly in the two counties. In Costilla, only 75.5% of high school students graduate while in Boulder, 91% percent of High School students graduate. Looking at these statistics, it is clearly seen how Boulder is doing so much better off than Costilla County.

      In the opinion of our group, we believe that there is no singular factor that is most important in determining the which county should be developed. We believe this because no single factor can tell the whole story. For example, one would not be able to determine if a county would need to be developed with just the factor of Per Capita income, because there is still a possibility of a large discrepancy in income between social classes. Therefore it is necessary to combine multiple looks at multiple statistics when determining something like this. In Costilla County, the majority of the population works in the primary sector, mostly in farming and agriculture. Primary sector workers make up the majority of the population.

     If we were to volunteer in Costilla County, we would most likely volunteer at the food pantry of Costilla County. We decided on this, because there is such a high percentage of people below the poverty line, and of people on food stamps. From these statistics we have determined that volunteering or donating to the food pantry would greatly impact the community of Costilla county.

ALL DATA IN THIS POWERPOINT IS PROVIDED BY THE 2014 U.S. CENSUS