The High Price of Dropping Out: No Diploma Amounts to Less Lifetime Income, Study Says

By Joe Walker, The Paducah Sun, Ky.

Jun. 3– — The 28 students who dropped out of the Paducah Tilghman High School Class of 2006 during the past four years will earn at least $7.3 million less over their lives than the 161 who got their diplomas.

That is based on an estimated $260,000 difference in lifetime earnings between a high school dropout and a graduate. A January study by the Washington, D.C.-based Alliance for Excellent Education used that baseline to show that the nation’s nearly 1.2 million Class of 2006 dropouts would collectively earn about $309 billion more if they finished high school.

Another January study — by a team of economists from Columbia, Princeton and the City University of New York — concluded that benefits to society are 212 times greater than the cost of five top intervention programs known to raise high school graduation rates. If the number of high school dropouts were cut in half, the government would reap $45 billion in extra tax revenue and reduced costs of public health, crime and justice, and welfare payments, according to “The Costs and Benefits of an Excellent Education for All of America’s Children.”

Earning power drastically increases by educational level if people find work in their fields, but too many college graduates are having a hard time doing that, Paducah Public Schools Superintendent Randy Greene said.

Greene said young people aren’t being trained for the leading employment sector — hundreds of thousands of service-industry jobs that come open annually across the nation. Instead, the education system is geared toward preparing students for college.

“My personal belief is the state needs to be focused early on students who are more suitable for the vocational system,” Greene said. “Not everybody can and should go to college, and there are a lot of jobs out there for those who don’t.”

Some kids drop out over frustration at failing core classes and being held back.

“We label them as failures, and they’re not failures,” Greene said. “We just need to help them find areas in which they can succeed.”

Paducah schools have several intervention programs including Head Start for preschoolers, after-school and homework clubs and federal funding to limit class sizes. The Reality Store allows students in middle and high schools to learn about careers, lifestyles and pay levels; Gear Up lets high school juniors spend a day at Murray State University to get a taste of college life.

Seventy-two percent of 2006 Tilghman graduates said they planned to attend college (48 percent in Kentucky) or pursue some type of work-school combination; 18.6 percent said they were going straight to work; 3.1 percent planned to enter the military.

That total of 93.7 percent was the highest ever, said Vickie Maley, assistant superintendent of instructional programs. “Only 10 of 161 students didn’t chose those avenues, and that’s 10 more than we want.”

Tilghman’s dropout rate of 3.65 percent was slightly higher than the state average of 3.31 percent. Dropout rates in Kentucky have declined since peaking at 5.53 percent in 1995 and 1996.

The Tilghman graduation rate of 79.08 percent was below the state average of 83.26. But minorities, who traditionally have higher dropout rates, make up 49.7 percent of Tilghman’s student body. Two-thirds of the students are economically disadvantaged.

In their study, the economists said the monetary effect of dropping out of high school is much more pronounced for minorities, especially blacks. For example, only 49 percent of black male dropouts found work, earning an average of $13,500 annually. That compared with 71 percent of whites, earning an average of $22,800 a year.

The study showed that investing $82,000 for every student who graduated because of the key interventions would return $209,000 during their lives in tax revenue and $70,000 in lowered costs for public health, social welfare and corrections. The study endorsed two preschool programs, a high school intervention, lower elementary school class sizes and a 10 percent across-the-board pay raise to attract “a larger pool” of talented teachers.

Tilghman has one of the highest teacher pay rates in western Kentucky, as well as many intervention programs, Maley said.

The Alliance for Excellent Education’s review of Census data showed that in 2004, the average high school graduate earned $26,156, compared with $16,485 for a dropout. Those with associate’s degrees earned an average $35,103, and those with bachelor’s degrees earned $49,656.

Higher earnings translate into greater buying power, higher tax receipts and improved productivity, the report said.

“Unless high schools are able to graduate their students at higher rates, more than 12 million students will drop out during the course of the next decade,” the study said. “The result will be a loss to the nation of $3 trillion.”



On the Web:

–www.cbcse.org

–www.all4ed.org

—–

To see more of The Paducah Sun, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.paducahsun.com.

Copyright (c) 2007, The Paducah Sun, Ky.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.