Reducing the Nation's Dropout Rate

Dropout Fact Sheet

NEA Policy on High School Attendance, Graduation, Completion, & Dropouts

The National Education Association believes great public schools are a basic right for every child.  The organization's highest decision-making body, the Representative Assembly, adopted NEA Resolution B-5, which supports the concept of a high school education for all and states that every student should earn a high school diploma or its equivalent.  In fact, this has been our policy since 1976. In 2004, the Representative Assembly voted to oppose "barrier tests" that deny promotion or graduation to students. Most recently, the legislative agenda pursued by NEA through the 109th Congress (2005) included a call for federal programs designed to increase high school graduation rates.

According to the study The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts (March 2006) (see www.civicenterprises.net/pdfs/thesilentepidemic3-06.pdf ),

• The national graduation rate is between 68-71 percent; the graduation rate for Black, Hispanic, and Native American students is about 50 percent, while graduation rates for Whites and Asians hover around 75-77 percent, respectively.
  
• High school education attainment rates vary significantly among individual Asian and Pacific Islander ethnic groups, and in some cases fall well below national averages according to U.S. Census studies of the educational attainment of those age 25 and older. (See www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/censr-17.pdf and www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/censr-26.pdf.)
  
  
• Nearly one third of all public school students fail to graduate with their class.

• In 2000, young adults living in families with incomes in the lowest 20 percent of all family incomes were six times as likely as their peers from families in the top 20 percent of the income distribution to drop out of high school.

Dropouts Often Experience Negative Outcomes

• High school dropouts are 72 percent more likely to be unemployed as compared to high school graduates (U.S. Department of Labor, 2003).
  
  
• 75 percent of America's state prison inmates are high school dropouts (Harlow, 2003).
  
  
• 59 percent of America's federal prison inmates did not complete high school (Harlow, 2003).
  
  
• High school dropouts are more than three times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested in their lifetime (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2003).
  
  
• According to the National Longitudinal Transition Study of special education students, the arrest rates of youth with disabilities who dropped out were significantly higher than those who had graduated (Wagner et al., 1991).
  
  
• A survey by the U.S. Department of Justice in the early 1990s estimated that a Black male born in 1991 stood a 28 percent chance of going to prison; an update in 2003 put the odds at 33 percent. (See  http://www.asbj.com/2005/09/0905research.html.)

Dropouts Cost Society 

• Approximately 47 percent of high school dropouts are employed compared to 64 percent of high school graduates not in college (National Center for Education Statistics, 1995).
  
  
• Students who graduate from high school earn an average of $9,245 more money per year than students who do not complete school (Employment Policy Foundation, 2001). (See http://www.ncset.org/publications/essentialtools/dropout/handout1.asp.)
  
  
• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the 2001 unemployment rate for adults over 25 without a high school diploma was 7.2 percent. That figure dropped to 4.2 percent for high school graduates without any college and to 2.3 percent for those with a bachelor's degree or higher. For more information, visit http://www.pbs.org/now/society/dropouts.html.
  
  
• The United States could recoup nearly $200 billion a year in economic losses and secure its place as the world's future economic and educational leader by raising the quality of schooling, investing more money and other resources in education, and lowering dropout rates.
  
  
• A high school dropout earns about $260,000 less over his or her lifetime than a high school graduate and pays about $60,000 less in taxes.
  
  
• Annual losses exceed $50 billion in federal and state income taxes for all 23 million of the nation's high school dropouts aged 18-67.
  
  
• The United States loses $192 billion—1.6 percent of its current gross domestic product in combined income and tax-revenue losses—with each group of 18-year-olds who never complete high school. Increasing the educational attainment of that same group of individuals by one year would recoup nearly half of those losses.