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As a USAFacts newsletter reader, you clearly care about being civically engaged. Now, you can help shape the next phase of USAFacts. The USAFacts User Experience team is seeking people to join its participant pool. This team occasionally emails various surveys and interviews to participants and uses the feedback to improve USAFacts.org.

Interested in joining? Please fill out this survey — and feel free to share it with friends.

To everyone who is already part of the participant pool, thank you! We appreciate your valuable feedback. 

(If you have questions for the User Experience team, email them here.)


What states are getting older?

The number of Americans ages 65 and older is rising due to the combination of an aging generation and a decreasing death rate for older people. But where are most of these people residing? What states have had the biggest shifts in older populations over the past 40 years?

• As of 2020, over 20% of the populations in Maine, Florida, West Virginia, and Vermont are 65 or older. Net migration accounts for much of Florida’s 65 and older population. Maine has the highest percentage of 65+ residents of all states: 21.2%.
   
• Alaska’s elderly population is relatively small but more than doubled between 2000 and 2020, the largest increase nationwide.

• The nation’s 65+ population also more than doubled between 1980 and 2020, growing by 20.5 million people (a 59% increase) since 2000 alone.

• Washington, DC and 14 states have been hit by the eye of a hurricane at least once since 1851. The eye, or the very center of a hurricane, is usually 20 to 40 miles wide with relatively low wind speeds. It’s surrounded, however, by the eyewall, the part of the hurricane where winds are their fastest and most destructive.
   
• Florida’s Miami-Dade County and Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish have each been hit by a hurricane eye 16 times, the most of the country.
   
• A “normal” season has seven hurricanes, with three reaching Category 3 or higher. 2020 was the last above-normal season with nine hurricanes.

See more, including a map from Texas to Maine of the counties that have been hit by the eye of a hurricane since 1851.


Data in the news 

• Student loans and the price of college are still in the news, and readers are rediscovering this article about how the cost of education is rising faster than wages for people who have earned degrees.
   
• The heatwaves in several parts of the country and the recent flooding in Mississippi and Georgia have Americans thinking about climate norms. Use USAFacts’ climate data to follow extreme weather trends in your county and nationwide. 
   
• Are you caught up on the newest USAFacts articles? Then you’re ready for this week’s quiz!

One last fact