The Dropout Epidemic

April 10, 2006 — -- America's children are leaving school in higher numbers than most people realize, according to a report in Time magazine. The issue's cover story reports that one in three American students leave high school before graduating.

Minority communities are hit particularly hard by the problem. Nearly half of African-American children and more than half of Hispanic children never graduate from high school. It also appears that despite the federal government's contention that the dropout rate is less than 10 percent, the dropout rate of one-third goes back at least 20 years.

"Even though we say education is important to us, we actually don't have very good data on what is working and what isn't," said Nathan Thornburgh, the author of the Time article. "For decades, schools and the federal government said we had graduation rates that were up in the 90s. Some places even claimed near-perfect graduation rates. But starting in 2001, researchers started peeling back the layers."

Talk-show host and media mogul Oprah Winfrey and Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, are tackling the problem. Winfrey will feature the issue on her program on Tuesday and Wednesday.

"We've really got to step back and say this system isn't working," Bill Gates told Winfrey.

"It's failing," Melinda Gates said.

An Epidemic

The Gates Foundation calls dropping out a "silent epidemic" because of the strong correlation between leaving school without earning a diploma and other problems later on in life.

For example, 67 percent of prison inmates nationwide are high school dropouts, and half of all dropouts ages 16 to 24 are unemployed. Four out of 10 young adults who don't graduate get some type of government assistance.

Moreover, high school graduates on average make $9,200 more each year than high school dropouts. Over the course of their lifetimes, college graduates make more than $1 million more than classmates who don't finish high school.

"Dropping out is one of those life changes that have far-reaching effects, even on the next generation," Thornburgh said. "People who drop out of high school are much more likely to have kids who drop out."

It wasn't always this way. Fifty years ago, someone who did not graduate from high school could earn a decent living with a manufacturing job, Thornburgh wrote. Now, according to a survey by Achieve, Inc., almost half of employers say that people with a high school degree alone are not qualified for entry-level jobs.

Those who leave high school can opt for a graduation equivalency degree, but Thornburgh found that GED holders and dropouts had very similar life outcomes in comparison to students who graduated high school.

The Surprising Reasons Behind Dropping Out

The reasons why students drop out are more complex than the reasons many people may think: teenage pregnancy, social problems and financial hardships. Nearly 90 percent of the students who quit school had passing grades when they dropped out, Thornburgh said.

"The big reason was lifestyle," he said. "They just didn't want to have to put up with the grind."

The article said that students were bored with school and that 40 percent of those who left were thought to do so in their senior year.

Thornburgh said what he found indicated that the best way to curb the dropout rate was to teach reading early, and to try to spot future dropouts and help them.

"Most dropouts repeatedly skip class, and some of the parents I talked to whose kids dropped out told me, 'The school never told me,'" he said.

A good alternative is to get these children enrolled in a vocational school. Across the country, enrollment in vocational education is up 58 percent and Thornburgh said studies had shown that at-risk kids were eight times to 10 times less likely to leave school if they enrolled in a vocational program.

"Nowadays, it isn't all about car repair," he said. "It's just as likely to be about computer networks."