The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels

More students graduated high school in the 1960s than today according to a new report called The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels by Nobel Prize winning economist Dr. James Heckman and co-author Paul A. LaFontain. While some reports find that graduation rates have risen over the last 40 years, this one finds those results are largely due to the increase in people receiving a GED after dropping out of school rather than students actually earning a regular high school diploma.

Overview

Title: The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels

Author(s): James J. Heckman and Paul A. LaFontaine

Research Methods: Descriptive statistics

Publisher: The Institute of the Study of Labor (IZA)

Peer Reviewed: No

Released: December 2007

The question(s): What is the true overall high school graduation rate and minority graduation rate? How has this changed over the last 40 years? Why are there differences in reported graduation rates? How have graduation rates affected college going rates over the last 40 years?

The study: The authors compare graduation rates that are based on various data sources such as the Census, the Common Core of Data (CCD), and national longitudinal studies to show how graduation rates differ. All of these data sources use varying methodologies depending on the data used and how graduation rates were defined. The authors then adjusted each data source so the same types of students were sampled and a similar calculation was used to determine a common graduation rate. They then used the common graduation rate to examine how graduation rates have changed over the last 40 years. Finally, the authors examine the impact high school graduation rates have had on college going rates over the past 40 years.

Full Report: Download PDF

The findings

Graduation Rates Over Time

The true high school graduation rate is around 75 percent for all students, which is lower than the NCES official reported rate of 88 percent but higher than Education Week's highly reported on-time graduation rate of 70 percent.
The overall graduation rate peaked in the late 1960s at around 80 percent but has steadily declined four to five points since then. Rates did increase some following the release of the report A Nation At Risk in 1983 and the passing of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002.
The decrease in overall graduation rates is largely due to the decline of male students failing to graduate. The male graduation rate has declined by nearly 7 percentage points over the past 40 years while the female graduation rate has remained relatively steady.
College enrollments over the last 40 years have declined especially among males, which is partly due to the decline in high school graduation rates.

Graduation Rates by Race/Ethnicity

The gap in graduation rates between white students and their black and Hispanic peers has not narrowed over the past 35 years. Graduation rates for white (approximately 81 percent) students are almost 16 points higher than for black and Hispanic students who graduate at about a 65 percent rate even though recent estimates for graduation rates of minority students have ranged from 50 percent to 85 percent.
The increase in graduation rates for minority students, according to the Census data, is due to the increase of minority males receiving a GED in prison not to an actual increase in minority students receiving a high school diploma.
The decline in graduation rates cannot be attributed to the increase in recent immigrant student enrollments. There is still a decline in graduation rates when students who arrived in the United States after age 10 were excluded.

grad rates over time

grad rates 2002

More on this topic

Guide to high school graduation rates

Keeping kids in school: What research says about dropout prevention

Keep in mind that:

People who receive a high school equivalency certificate like the GED or certificate of completion are not considered high school graduates. Only those students who earned at least a regular high school diploma are considered graduates.
Graduation rates in this report are not on-time graduation rates. Depending on the data being used, the authors calculate graduation rates based on students who received a diploma by age 24 or within two years following their expected graduation date.

Conclusion

Because there are many opinions on graduation rates it is difficult for non-researchers to know how many students are actually graduating high school. Although it took a Nobel Prize winner to do it, this report does provide some clarity on how many students are graduating today and how that number has changed over the past 40 years.

Unfortunately the report does not provide school board members with graduation rates at the district or even state level. However, school board members, educators, and parents can better evaluate their local graduation rates by determining which students are graduating when and with what type of degree. If your district has implemented a successful dropout program that enables students to graduate in more than the traditional four years, then your local graduation rate may not capture these students. On the other hand, your graduation rate may be inflated if it includes GED recipients. If this is your situation, your school boards should look into why these students did not complete high school and implement a dropout prevention program to meet their needs because we know that earning a regular diploma will increase students' life prospects.

Although calculating an accurate graduation rate in-and-of-itself does not improve graduation rates, it is an important tool to properly identify a problem so that proper policies can be enacted.

Posted: March 17, 2008