Andrew Sum and Paul Harrington, The Business Roundtable
May 2003
More than a year ago, the Manhattan Institute's Jay Greene alerted the nation to the fact that federal data on high school completions and dropouts are misleading - and far too cheerful. [http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/v01/gadfly26.html#reviews1] Greene showed that, if you discount GEDs and look simply at the number of Americans who get high school diplomas four years after they exit eighth grade, the on-time high school graduation rate is only about 71 percent for the country as a whole - and far lower in some states and among minority students.
Two recent reports from other sources now raise additional problems with the high school completion data supplied by the National Center on Education Statistics (NCES). A study by the Center for Labor Market Studies, commissioned by the Business Roundtable, says that (in addition to the GED issue) NCES excludes hundreds of thousands of youths in jails and other institutions, artificially deflates the dropout rate by including too many young people in the denominator, and draws an unrepresentative statistical sample of young people. After making these adjustments, analysts Andrew Sum and Paul Harrington (with many helpers) estimate that the correct high school graduation rate is about 70 percent - almost the same as Greene's figure. This paper can be found on the Roundtable's website at www.brtable.org./pdf/914.pdf.