The United States has lost its standing as a leader in high
school graduates, now ranking 17th out of the 23 nations for which rates
are reported. And that’s using the generally rosier Census data (see
Appendix Figure A-1).
The United States continues to decline on this measure even as it manages to rank first in total expenditures per student for all levels of education.
Other measures appear to show that graduation rates have been stagnant
for the last 40 years and remain critically low in our nation’s urban areas
and in parts of rural America.
Graduation gaps between majority and minority groups have not narrowed in the last three decades. Mostly in large cities, schools described as “dropout factories” often see fewer than fifty percent of their students graduate.
Twelve percent of the nation’s high schools, about 2,000 in number, produce more than half of its dropouts and close to three-quarters of its minority dropouts. Urban areas graduate, on average, fourteen percent fewer of their students than
suburban areas.
Such trends matter because there’s no getting around the fact that, on average, high school graduates experience better economic outcomes than students who don’t graduate, just as those who graduate from college enjoy markedly better economic outcomes than those who only graduate from high school. As a result, high school graduation rates are also an important indicator of the future success of our workforce.
The economic returns of graduation have increased even as the percentage of young people graduating has not. College graduates with a bachelor’s or higher degree have median weekly earnings nearly 2.5 times greater than the typical high school dropout, amounting to an annual difference of $33,488.10
The gap in unemployment rates between those with a four-year college degree and those without a high school diploma widened from 3.3 percentage points in 1970 to 5.1points in 2007.
There’s even evidence that dropping out of high school is a public health
issue.
Wolfe, C. (2009). What’s at stake., p. 3. Captured September 5, 2009.