The importance of education can be seen in the incidence of HIV contraction. In the New Jersey Health curriculum most HIV/AIDS prevention education takes place during high school. So, hypothetically, the greater incidence of citizens that did not complete high school should associate with a higher cumulative AIDS rate. The correlation coefficients relating the percentage of the population that had received some high school education but had not graduated and the AIDS rate were determined by race and gender. All of the correlations calculated for male and female whites, blacks or African-Americans, and Hispanics were significant positive associations.

Figure 7.

Figure 8.

The strongest of these associations were in black or African-American males, 0.934 (Table 8), and black or African-American females, 0.886 (Table 9). When comparing the maps for these educational trends, they appear to be very similar, further associating the impact of a complete high school education on HIV awareness (Figure 7, Figure 8). These statistics paralleled research findings that have concluded that black and African-American females and males are the highest risk groups in Essex County for the contraction of HIV.

Figure 9.

Figure 10.

Other significant associations exist between white (Table 10) and Hispanic  (Table 11) females, 0.746 and 0.679, respectively. The correlations were slightly weaker for their male counterparts, with the white male coefficient at 0.725 (Table 12) and the Hispanic male coefficient at 0.639 (Table 13).  When looking at the association between white females without a high school diploma and AIDS rate, Irvington is an outlier; the AIDS rate is not nearly as high as the rest of the numbers would predict for such a lack of education (Figure 9).  The presence of this outlier suggests that in Irvington, white females are probably not at the highest risk for HIV/AIDS. Only slight differences are observed between the educational maps of Hispanic females (Figure 10), white males (Figure 11), and Hispanic males (Figure 12) because all three correlations are similarly strong positives. Gender was a significant factor because there is a high incidence of contraction of HIV through heterosexual contact in Essex County.

Figure 11.

Figure 12.

The successful completion of higher education showed expected significant negative correlations in both genders of whites and blacks or African-Americans. The data for percentage of the specified population over 25 which had obtained a Bachelor’s degree was compared to the cumulative AIDS rates. For all 4 groups, significant negative correlations were obtained. The strongest association was that of white males, -0.768 (Table 14), which was a good deal stronger than that of white females, -0.670 (Table 15). However, in blacks and African-Americans, the association of Bachelor’s degrees to AIDS rates was stronger in females, -0.701 (Table 16), than in males, -0.610 (Table 17). The map of white males with Bachelor’s degrees is a striking example of the clear trends across the county from west to east (Figure 13). For correlation between percentage of Black males with a Bachelor’s degree and AIDS rate, Nutley was an outlier with a very high percentage of males with Bachelor’s degrees and the lowest AIDS rate (Figure 14).

Figure 13.

Figure 14.