High school dropout rate must be stemmed
In the months since Detroit declared bankruptcy and became the largest such municipality in the country to grasp that straw, a steady stream of articles published in newspapers and magazines has looked back with longing on a middle class that once populated the Motor City and has since vanished, like victims of a plague.
By and large, the articles summon up a reliable selection of images – a well-maintained ranch or two-story house with a boat and a couple of cars in the driveway, a mother who is able to stay out of the workforce so she can tend to home and hearth, two or three kids attending quality local schools on their way to college, and a father who is able to pay for all that comfort and security with a paycheck earned by putting in his time on one of the assembly lines of the “Big Three.”
And all of this could be attained with just a high school diploma. In the years after World War II, America’s manufacturing preeminence was so unassailable that some of those jobs could even be had with a couple of years of high school, no sheepskin required. Change the names of the industries and cities – steel in Pittsburgh, shipping in Buffalo, N.Y. – and the story was much the same.
Not anymore. Even those lucky enough to cover the hefty costs associated with a four-year university education and escape without onerous debt are finding their place in the middle class ever more precarious, and it’s even tougher for those who acquire no postsecondary education.
Drop out of high school now and your odds in life’s lottery plummet to rock-bottom.
Forgoing a high school diploma not only diminishes an individual’s opportunities and earning power, but a recently published report explicates how society as a whole pays a price. The Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization, released a study earlier this month that said the United States could save up to $18.5 billion per year if the dropout rate among young men could be reduced by just 5 percent. In Pennsylvania, the savings would come to $737 million.
Much of that money ends up being dedicated to the criminal justice system – apprehending wrongdoers, convicting them and putting them behind bars. Of course, it’s not inevitable that a high school dropout is going to be incarcerated, just as a high school or college diploma is no guarantee of unblemished good citizenship. But, according to figures from the Justice Department, 69 percent of inmates in local jails, 67 percent of those in state lockups, and 56 percent of those in federal prison are high school dropouts. Moreover, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, the 33,400 students who dropped out of Pennsylvania’s high schools in 2011 will be missing out on a total of $4.1 billion in lifetime earnings.
Remember that slogan coined by the United Negro College Fund in the early 1970s, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”? There’s perhaps no better illustration of that waste than the untapped potential of a student who throws his own education away.
Right now, 75 percent of students enrolled in the nation’s high schools will eventually graduate. That’s the best it’s been in 40 years, but it still means that 1 in 4 will drop out. That number must change, particularly when you consider that we lag behind South Korea, Germany, Britain, Finland and a whole host of other developed nations on this score. Having too many of our high schoolers drop out puts a ball and chain on our economic competitiveness.
President Obama said it well in an address to Congress in 2009: “Dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself – it’s quitting on your country.”