Dropping out of high school could ruin your life
If you know someone who is considering dropping out of high school, you might want to tell them to think again. A new study commissioned by the Chicago-based Alternative Schools Network and performed by Boston’s Northeastern University unveiled the high costs of dropping out school — for both the dropout and society as a whole.
“Those adults who fail to graduate from high school with a diploma face enormous obstacles in achieving adequate employment, earnings, and incomes over their entire adult life,” reads the report’s introduction. “The costs of dropping out of high school have increased over time for both the dropouts themselves and for society at large in the form of reduced federal, state, and local taxes and increased expenditures on dropouts in the form of cash and in-kind transfers.”
One of the most obvious effects of dropping out of school is the impact it will have on one’s earning power. According to the report, the lifetime earnings for an Illinois high school dropout is 60 percent less than that of a high school graduate in the state. In raw numbers, a high school graduate can expect to earn $1,066,000 over a lifetime, while a dropout will likely only net $595,000. Someone with an associate degree will earn $1,509,000. Here’s another illustration of the negative impact of dropping out: Close to 50 percent of Chicago dropouts aged 18 to 64 failed to work at all during 2010, with the group battling an unemployment rate four times higher than that of college graduates.
The societal costs of dropping out of high school are quite steep as well. The researchers found that high school dropouts will cost society $70,000 during their working years, while high school graduates contribute an average of $236,000 to the economy over their earning years. College graduates add a substantial amount more, with an average economic contribution of $885,000.
Incarceration rates for high school dropouts were high when compared to graduates, according to the report. Close to 15 percent of dropouts studied in the report aged 18 to 34 were incarcerated at some point in 2010, while only 3 percent of high school graduates spent time in jail. Meanwhile, only 0.1 percent of college graduates were incarcerated in 2010.
Additionally, researcher and report author Andrew Sum, who is also a professor of Economics at Northeastern University and director of the school’s Center for Labor Market Studies, says that high school dropouts are much less likely to vote or make civic contributions.
