High School Attendance, Graduation, Completion, & Dropout Statistics

Five out of every 100 young adults enrolled in high school in October 1999 left school before October 2000 without successfully completing a high school program. The percentage of young adults who left school each year without successfully completing a high school program decreased from 1972 through 1987. Despite year-to-year fluctuations, the percentage of students dropping out of school each year has stayed relatively unchanged since 1987.

• 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.
• In 2000, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that 64.1 percent of all Hispanic 18- through 24-year-olds had completed secondary schooling. This compares with 91.8 percent of White, 83.7 percent of Black, and 94.6 percent of Asian young adults.
  Youth who drop out are more likely to experience negative outcomes such as unemployment, underemployment, or incarceration.

• High school dropouts are 72 percent more likely to be unemployed as compared to high school graduates (U.S. Department of Labor, 2003).
• Nearly 80 percent of individuals in prison do not have a high school diploma (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1995).
• 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 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.

Additionally, the costs associated with the incidence of dropout for society are immense.

• 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).
• 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.

Why do students drop out?

• The strongest predictors that a student is likely to drop out are family characteristics such as: socioeconomic status, family structure, family stress (e.g., death, divorce, family moves), and the mother's age. Students who come from low-income families, are the children of single, young, unemployed mothers, or who have experienced high degrees of family stress are more likely than other students to drop out of school. Of those characteristics, low socioeconomic status has been shown to bear the strongest relationship to students' tendency to drop out.
• The tendency for students to drop out is also associated with their school experiences. According to the U.S. Department of Education, students drop out of school for the following reasons: Dislike of school; low academic achievement; retention at grade level; a sense that teachers and administrators do not care about students; and inability to feel comfortable in a large, depersonalized school setting (1999)