At the Blog | April 7, 2025

Beyond the Briefings: Education and Civil Society

By Russell Hancock

Education

I’m pleased to share some good news along with some mixed news about education.

When the pandemic set in, it affected our high school graduation rates. We’ve now recovered and are graduating around 85% of our kids every year, so that’s good news. There is more good news when we look at the share of high school graduates meeting University of California and California State University entrance requirements; we’re seeing incremental gains year by year across most ethnicities.

Comparing high school graduation rates from 2019, the year before the pandemic, to last year’s rates, we see progress among most racial and ethnic groups, including our Hispanic or Latino residents and our Black or African American residents — definitely good news for the region.

But we’re sad to report that high school dropout rates are showing disparities — higher proportions are associated with certain ethnicities, lower with others, so this remains a priority.

Internet Access

High percentages of Silicon Valley households have computer and internet access at home — numbers approaching 100%. This is good news, but we can’t get too comfortable, because when we separate homes by income level, there are significant disparities. In Silicon Valley, 17% of low-income homes lack internet access; in San Francisco, the number is a surprising ten points higher, at 27%.

There are groups working to address this, and they are making progress, but they still have a long row ahead of them. One of these is a project led by Joint Venture’s Civic Technologies Initiative — the Silicon Valley Digital Equity Partnership. In the last days of the Biden administration, it was selected to receive $12 million from the U.S. Department of Commerce to help close the digital divide, focusing on low-income, elderly, and rural populations.

Philanthropy

In the Index we track a number of indicators surrounding philanthropy and charitable giving. I’ll just highlight a few.

The share of taxable income donated to charity is generally increasing. There was a dip during the pandemic, which makes sense because unemployment rates and taxable income took a hit. We’ll stay tuned to see where this chart takes us as we emerge from the pandemic, but the good news is that people in Silicon Valley are generous, especially when compared to other parts of the state.

Looking at giving by corporate philanthropy, we see that our corporations responded with generosity to the pandemic; since then their donations have receded.

I’m listing the top 15 corporate philanthropists because I want you to see that almost every corporation on the list has been generous with Joint Venture Silicon Valley, and we’re grateful.

Silicon Valley’s approximately 2300 non-profit organizations have budgets totaling about $33 billion, making the non-profit sector a significant piece of the region’s overall employment picture. Non-profits are distributed heavily in health and human services and in higher education; there is lower but even distribution across arts, culture, and the humanities. Joint Venture Silicon Valley itself is difficult to categorize; we fill a unique niche in the non-profit landscape.

Governance and Political Participation

Joint Venture has a large number of indicators tracking Silicon Valley’s governance, civics, and political participation. We track revenue, representation, voter turnout, and more. For the record, we publish these indicators both in print and on the Silicon Valley Indicators dashboard (SiliconValleyIndicators.org), where you can access them interactively.

Included on the dashboard is a compendium of the region’s elected officials—their contact information, their demographic breakdown, and other helpful information.

Let’s look at some interesting trends. Women are increasingly being elected to office. In 2017, 36% of our locally elected representatives were women; that percentage has grown since then to 38%.

Looking at elected officials by race and ethnicity, we see that White or Caucasian residents held about 70% of seats in 2017. That number has now dropped to 59%, and we’ve seen a corresponding growth in the number of Asian or Pacific Islanders and Hispanic or Latino residents seeking elective office.

This is good news. Representation doesn’t yet reflect actual population shares, but the trend is in the right direction.

You’ll want to know that Silicon Valley votes. We vote! People vote the conventional way, meaning that on Election Day morning we report to our precincts and cast our votes in person. But Silicon Valley also embraces other methods — showing up at an early voting center or using the mail-in ballots. All told, our rate of voter participation in the last election was very high.

Blue Turning Shades of Purple?

Silicon Valley is famously blue. Everybody in the nation knows that California is blue and the Bay Area is infamously blue. The data confirm this, but we should also understand the nuances, especially concerning Republicans.

In 1970 Silicon Valley was 41% Republican; that number has fallen to 16%. It’s easy to think we have always been and always will be blue, but the missing nuance is that increasing numbers of people are declining to state their party preference. The number undeclared has grown as high as 29%; in the last election it was 26%.

The prevailing notion is that the November 2024 election was a backlash against elites — against the agenda of the previous White House incumbents. Conventional wisdom says the Bay Area doesn’t participate in this narrative because Silicon Valley lives in a blue bubble. But the trend we need to recognize is that the Republican Party received significant support from the Bay Area over the past two elections. The president grew his support in the Bay Area by 43% from 2016 to 2024. Nearly every city saw movement toward the Republican Party over the last two elections, and the president’s support grew in all but two of them — in 67 of the Bay Area’s 69 cities.

Here's another significant trend. As Kamala Harris is a Bay Area native, the assumption was that she would carry the Bay Area overwhelmingly. But in fact that wasn’t the case. Kamala Harris and her party received 20% fewer votes last year than they did when she was on the ticket in 2020.

What does this mean? It means we’re starting to turn shades of purple.

Let me draw some dotted lines. Many people, including David Brooks, our keynote speaker, have interpreted the 2024 election as a statement about a supposed caste system in the United States, and a rejection of elites. In our presentation at State of the Valley, we showed you the numbers. Our wealth and income gaps are significant.

If the election was a revolt against elites, then this is early evidence that forces may play out here the same way they did in the Heartland and other areas of the country.

Here's one final, highly significant trend. We find that Silicon Valley residents also define the tech sector as part of that elite class. When we conducted the annual Silicon Valley Poll last fall, we discovered strong sentiment directed not only against elites, but also against the tech sector.

It gives me no pleasure to report this. But if we are to understand our region in all its nuances, then we need to understand that backlash against the tech sector is also playing out here, in a place we had thought was a bubble.

About the Author

Russell Hancock is president and CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley. He also serves as president of Joint Venture’s research arm, the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies. Learn more about Russ on his bio page.