Dropping Out: A Costly Decision: For Every Student Who Doesn’t Don the Gown, for Every Teen Who Bypasses the Flat Hat With the Silky Tassel, for Every Teen Who Doesn’t Step on Stage to Grasp That High School Diploma, We All Pay. And We Pay a Lot.

By Story Mark Guydish, Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Times Leader

May 6–In the course of their lives, the students who dropped out in a single year from Luzerne County public schools will have cost the economy $42 million to $86 million, depending on which expert’s numbers you use.

It’s widely acknowledged that dropouts typically make less money and need more social services, but two recent studies put a dollar value on what those dropouts actually cost the economy.

The Alliance for Excellent Education used a simple formula based on a study that estimated, on average, graduates earn $260,000 more than dropouts throughout their working careers. Columbia University professor Henry Levin and several others did a much more detailed study that took into account many factors, including how much it cost to keep potential dropouts in school until graduation. Levin’s report estimated the net benefit to the economy per potential dropout was $127,000.

But these aren’t just abstract figures, they are young lives, and in the case of pregnant teens, young lives involving newborn infants.

On an April day punctuated by a wet snowfall, Angel Manzietti sat alone at the end of a long table, scratching answers into a workbook. Pregnant and 20, Manzietti said she didn’t really drop out of Wyoming Valley West High School, “I just stopped going.”

Yet it didn’t take long for her to realize that, as a single mom without a high school degree, her prospects were grayer than the winter sky. “I’m sick of working at places I don’t really want to work at,” she said. So Manzietti enrolled in a graduate equivalency degree program offered in Wilkes-Barre by the Luzerne Intermediate Unit through CareerLink, a state program that replaced what was known to a previous generation, in a simpler incarnation, as “the unemployment office.”

“I think everything happens for a reason,” Manzietti said. “I never went to school, I felt like I had more important things to do. But now that I’m pregnant, I don’t want to lose the kid.” So she’s refocused on how much education affects income, and is hoping to enroll in community college for a massage license, which in turn would be a steppingstone to becoming a chiropractor.

“I needed to come here so I wouldn’t have to worry about getting a job and about having the baby taken off me,” she said. “I want to be something.”

“Being something” does more than increase Manzietti’s probable income, Wilkes University business professor Anthony Liuzzo said. It dramatically improves her child’s odds as well.

“The single greatest impact on a person’s wealth is the education of their parents,” Liuzzo said. “If a person drops out of high school not only are they impacted, but their children, and their children’s children, are going to be impacted. How do you estimate what’s going to happen in 50 years?”

Neither the brief report from the Alliance for Excellent Education nor the more in-depth analysis by Levin tried to peer that deeply into the future, but both did look at what a single year’s worth of dropouts can cost the overall economy.

The Alliance multiplied the $260,000 estimated difference in income by the number of dropouts reported by the federal government. Using that method, dropouts in the 2005-2006 school year nationwide will cost the economy more than $309 billion over their working lives. In Pennsylvania, 32,074 dropouts cost the economy $8.3 billion.

Levin, on the other hand, looked at five dropout prevention programs, including increased teacher pay, reduced class sizes and aggressive work with the family of at-risk students. He estimated that the program “cost per expected high school graduate” ranged from $59,100 to $143,600, and added that into his calculations.

Levin also looked at how much a dropout costs society in a wide range of assistance programs later in life, as well as the cost through increased crime, lost tax revenue, and health care. Among those numbers, he determined that:

–Over the lifetime, the average saving to the public health system per expected high school graduate is $40,500.

–Since graduates are less likely to turn to crime, the average saving per new graduate is $26,600.

–The average saving in welfare payments per expected new graduate is $3,000.

Levin’s bottom line: “The net economic benefit to the public purse is therefore $127,000 per student and the benefits are 2.5 times greater than the costs.”

Liuzzo offers a key warning. The formulas devised by both the Alliance for Excellent Education and Levin work best when applied on a national level. Dropouts and graduates might migrate far from the school they left, spreading the benefits or costs of their decisions. So while we can calculate the estimated cost of dropouts from each district, it doesn’t mean Luzerne County — much less that district — will bear that cost.

Angel Torrales, who migrated here from the Reading area, and Edward Morgan from Pittsburgh are good examples. Both dropped out of high school far from Luzerne County, but are trying to earn their graduate equivalency degrees here. Torrales, now 29, spent the past 12 years “bouncing from job to job.” Combined, those jobs give him a lot of experience, he said, but without a high school degree “when you look at it on paper, it doesn’t add up.”

The best income he could muster so far was $11.75 an hour in construction. Since his parents are from Puerto Rico and he is bilingual, he’s betting that the equivalency degree and some college training could help him make two or three dollars more an hour working “as a Spanish-speaking rep inside an office.

“If it prevents students from dropping out and making the wrong decision, I’m happy to talk about it,” Torrales said.

Morgan waited even longer to get his equivalency degree. He’s 48 and spent 12 years in construction followed by 10 years in sales. But drug and alcohol abuse took its toll, and he’s trying to rebound. He sees the graduate equivalency degree as a steppingstone to a commercial driver’s license that will land him a truck-driving job.

“I wanted a better life and to further my horizons. This is key,” he said. “Staying in high school would have broadened my options, meant a better income. … I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for kids to get an education.”

Not surprisingly, those “kids” on the cusp of leaving school don’t think in terms of how much dropping out might cost society. Their reasoning is far simpler. One study showed more than half of those who drop out do so because they found class work uninteresting or irrelevant, as Dallas High School senior James Czekalski demonstrated.

“None of the classes were challenging,” he said standing in the hallway of what used to be Mackin Elementary School in Wilkes-Barre. “This year I just stopped going.” When told that he had missed so many classes he might not graduate, “I didn’t realize how far I was taking it.”

Now he’s attending a “service learning” program run by the Luzerne Intermediate Unit, one of a growing variety of “alternative education” offerings in the area designed to keep kids from dropping out. Alternative education has boomed since the federal law known as No Child Left Behind was enacted in 2002. The law threatens to stop federal funding for schools that have a low graduation rate.

This particular program, teacher John Chabalko said, focuses on giving kids a more relaxed atmosphere and frequently getting them out of the building and into the field doing real-world projects. State-mandated lesson material is worked into those projects.

Given the choice between this and repeating his senior year, Czekalski chose to come here. Now he’s planning beyond graduation to a career in culinary arts.

Nikita Kolbeck, from Wyoming Area High School, was ready to drop out because of a relatively new state-mandated graduation requirement, the senior project. Though students can pick their own projects, it can take many hours of work outside the classroom and involve writing numerous papers. “I couldn’t do it,” she said. Like Czekalski, she was given the option of coming here, and found the project much easier to do in the smaller class setting.

Patricia Castillo, a Meyers High School student in Wilkes-Barre, gave a more pressing reason she nearly dropped out before opting for the LIU program.

“I wanted to come here,” she said, noting that she had missed too much school to graduate without this last chance. “I needed the hours. I have a baby, and I’m working. Last year I was going to drop out and was told about this. Hopefully I’ll graduate this year and go to college in the fall.

“I’m not in school for myself but for my daughter,” Castillo said. “I want to give her a better life.”

Mark Guydish, a Times Leader staff writer, can be reached at 829-7161.

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Copyright (c) 2007, Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Times Leader

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