Dropouts, Prison, and GEDs

In December, James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who has also achieved my life goal of having a statistic named after him, published, with Paul LaFontaine, an analysis of high school graduation rates. The study reaches four conclusions:

1. the high school graduation rate peaked in the late ’60s and has declined slightly since then
2. the high school graduation rate is quite a bit below the often reported level of 88%
3. about 65% of blacks and Hispanics leave school with diplomas
4. the minority-majority achievement gap seems not to have budged in the last 35 years

Though the whole paper is interesting, the last conclusion really interested me.

The reason that the majority-minority graduation rate is often reported to have converged is the GED. According to the authors:

We show that when we count GED recipients as dropouts (incarcerated or not), there is little convergence in high school graduation rates between whites and minorities over the past 35 years. A significant portion of the convergence reported in the official statistics is due to black males obtaining GED credentials in prison.

And GEDs, it turns out, are essentially worthless. Economically and socially, GED holders compare very closely with other dropouts. That’s mainly because they don’t have the non-cognitive skills (like perseverance) that diploma holders have had to demonstrate. The most astonishing thing about this to me, as usual, is that national-level statistics can be affected by the number of young black men in prison (nearly 10%).

This underscores two things to me. First, I think that it really points to the value of the diploma that my students are reaching for. We as teachers often disparage the quality of that degree, but it’s certainly worth noting that extensive research shows that students who graduate high school will do much better than those who merely complete it. Second, I think it drives home the point that our students—and particularly our black male students—are fighting substantial and entrenched societal obstacles to their success. Not that we didn’t already know.