Few facts interest Americans more than facts about Americans. For example, did you know that young women in the United States are more educated than young men? Or that computers are now found in a majority of U.S. homes? 

Those are just two of the facts distilled from data collected over the last 100 years and published in an Internet-only report titled The Population Profile of the United States: 2001, from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Produced every two years since 1974, the Population Profile reports call on the art and science of demography to turn reams of faceless numbers into realistic glimpses of how 140 million women and 134 million men share the "American lifestyle."

This year's Population Profile presents analysis and graphs covering: population distribution; geographic mobility; fertility; households, families, marital status and living arrangements; the living arrangements of children; housing; school enrollment; educational attainment; computer use; voting and registration; income; poverty; meeting basic needs; health insurance coverage; race and ethnicity; the foreign-born; older adults; people with disabilities; and the demographics of women and men. (All chapters are .pdf files, requiring the free Adobe Acrobat PDF file viewer.)

Here are some highlights from the report:

• Eighty-nine percent of women aged 25 to 29 were high school graduates in 2000,compared with 87 percent of men this age.

• The majority of college students have been women since 1979, and 30 percent of women held a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2001 compared to 28 percent of men.

• Between 1999 and 2000, 1.7 million people moved into the United States from abroad; two-thirds of these movers were foreign-born and not U.S. citizens.

• In 2000, only 11 percent of women at the end of their childbearing years had four or more children, compared with more than three times that percentage in 1976.

• The "traditional" family (married couple with children under 18) has become much less prevalent in recent decades; the proportion of these families fell from 40 percent of all households in 1970 to 24 percent in 2000.

• After five consecutive years of annual increases, real median household income did not change significantly between 1999 and 2000.

• The number of students enrolled in elementary school and high school in 2000 (49 million) matched the previous record set in 1970 when "baby boom" children attended school.

• For the first time ever, computers in 2000 were found in a majority of the country's homes (51 percent). In 1998, the rate was 42 percent.

• In the three years, from 1997-2000, the proportion of households with Internet access more than doubled, from 18 percent to 42 percent.

• While 12 percent of people native to the United States and 16 percent of naturalized citizens lacked health insurance during all of 2000, 41 percent of noncitizens were uninsured.

• In 2000, a ratio of 1-in-5 school-age children had at least one foreign-born parent.

As with all data from surveys, the estimates are subject to sampling variability and other sources of error. (U.S. Census Bureau)

Responding to the popularity of the report, the Census Bureau will now publish the Population Profile every year, with both a printed and Internet version released every two years and an Internet-only version the other years. This year's report is the first Internet-only version.