Drop out the Thought of Being a Drop Out

Drop Out the Thought of Being a Drop Out

Nelson Mandela once said “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Therefore, having a high school diploma is a major step on an individuals’ journey to changing the world. When individuals decide to leave high school they are known as “high school dropouts”. Most people do not know that when a person becomes a high school dropout, they have an affect on society. The affects that high school dropout have on society are more government assistance has to be provided, unemployment rate rises, and they raise the poverty level. Students drop out of high school for a number of reasons, such as family problems, to find a job, substance abuse, or because they have fallen behind in their course taking or have received failing grades. However, another significant reason for dropping out is emerging. Many students lose interest and motivation in education because the curriculum does not seem to have a real-world application (www.acteonline.org). Academics are often presented in isolation, instead of in a way that shines a spotlight on how the subject is applicable in the context of the real world. Becoming a high school dropout is a serious matter and should be decreased until prevented.

When the government has to provide assistance to those who are unstable; the individuals who decided to at least get a high school diploma and those who are in general stable have more taken from their income. As a result those people have to work harder for those who decided not to work at all. Medicaid is a health insurance program for low-income individuals and families who cannot afford health care costs. Medicaid serves low-income parents, children, seniors, and people with disabilities (www.ncdhhs.gov). Due to low income and job insecurity, high school dropouts face poorer health outcomes. Dropouts are less likely to receive job-based health insurance. Without access to health insurance, students who drop out may not receive crucial preventive health care which can lower the incidence of chronic diseases and increase life span (www.everydaylife.globalpost.com). An article on ABC News, “Students Dropping out of High School Reaches Epidemic Levels,” reports that a dropout's life span is nine years shorter than a high school graduates. The everyday worker has a portion of their income drafted from their weekly or bi-weekly check to help pay for Medicaid services so that those who decide to drop out of high school and cannot manage to take care of themselves can receive some kind of medical attention.

​As a result of those who drop out of high school adds to the ones who are already receiving government assistance. This means that taxes are raised so that the government can pay for more people to receive the different assistance. NPR's Claudio Sanchez told NPR Linda Whertheimer that dropouts cost taxpayers between $320 billion and $350 billion a year in lost wages, taxable income, health, welfare and incarceration costs, among others. Not only are high school dropouts a cost to the economy, but a cost to themselves as well. Of the 3.8 million students that start high school this year, a quarter won't receive a diploma. Those who don't finish will earn $200,000 less than those who do over their life time and $1 million less than a college graduate, Sanchez says (www.huffingtonpost.com). The more drop outs the more government assistance is needed to be given; which means the more money that comes from society’s workers income

​The next way that high school drop outs affect society is they increase the unemployment rate. Most jobs even fast food jobs require a high school diploma or GED. Dropouts are not eligible for 90 percent of the jobs in our economy, and a student drops out of high school every 26 seconds in the U.S., contributing to a rising unemployment rate. The biggest challenge in deriving solutions is states' individual data sets."The data right now is so unreliable, so useless because states essentially collect their own data and most of states don't really have a good way to come up with accurate estimates," Sanchez told Wertheimer. "And so if states ever get a handle on the data, I think it'll go a long ways toward really solving this problem because people will know what we're up against (www.huffingtonpost.com)."

75% of America's state prison inmates are high school dropouts (Harlow, 2003). 59% of America's federal prison inmates did not complete high school (Harlow, 2003). High school dropouts are 3.5 times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested in their lifetime (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2003a). A 1% increase in high school graduation rates would save approximately $1.4 billion in incarceration costs, or about $2,100 per each male high school (Economic Impacts of Dropouts) (Medicaid)graduate (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2003a). The cost to taxpayers of adult illiteracy is $224 billion per year (National Reading Panel, 1999).U.S. companies lose nearly $40 billion annually because of illiteracy (National Reading Panel, 1999).If literacy levels in the United States were the same as those in Sweden, the U.S. GDP would rise by approximately $463 billion and tax revenues would increase by approximately $162 billion (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2003e).For juveniles involved in quality reading instruction programs while in prison, recidivism was reduced by 20% or more (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2003a) (www.dropoutprevention.org).

The rate of unemployment for high school dropouts has always been higher than graduates. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 1980, graduates had a 12.5 percent unemployment rate, while the rate for dropouts was more than double, at 25.3 percent. In 1990, the rate for dropouts was 20.5 percent compared to 11.7 percent for graduates. In 2000, it was 17.7 percent and 9.1 percent respectively and in 2010, the unemployment rate for dropouts was about 7 percent more than for graduates (www.everydaylife.globalpost.com). More than half of the high school dropouts in America above age 25 are currently out of work, according to The Wall Street Journal. Americans