Consequences of Dropping out of School: Findings from High School and beyond

The dropout problem has recently been the focus of considerable concern and the subject of much re search. Nevertheless, the lack of a careful and systematic assess ment of the consequences of dropping out still exists. The pur pose of the present study was to examine the personal, social, and economic consequences of dropping out of school. The High School and Beyond (HS&B) data base was used to investi gate the experiences of dropouts and high school graduates in 1986, 4 years after the projected date of graduation. Specif ically, dropouts and graduates with no postsecondary education were compared on (a) self-esteem, (b) alcohol use, (c) polit ical/social participation measures, (d) work satisfaction, (e) salary of current job, (f) periods of unemployment, and (g) number of jobs. Multiple-regression analyses were used to deter mine the degree to which dropping out explained variance in those measures when race, urbanicity, geographic region, socioeconomic status, and academic achievement were held con stant. Dropouts differed from graduates with no postsecondary education on many personal and social adjustment measures. Results also indicated that male and female dropouts have dif ferent personal, social, and economic experiences. With increasing frequency, practitioners, research ers, and the general public have demonstrated alarm over the social impact of public school dropouts (Levin, 1985; Mann, 1986; Ordovensky, 1987; Pallas, 1986). One of the more dire notes was sounded by the National Dropout Prevention Center (1987): Every year more than 700,000 public school students drop out of school. By the year 2000, the number of students giving up on education will increase to about 40 percent or nearly 2,000,000. Tragically, most of these individuals will likely drop out of society, out of the work force, out of the American way of life. The "dropout problem" is clearly both serious and com plex, and it is considered a problem for individuals, schools, and society. When a young person drops out of school, judgments are often made as to his or her moral character and po tential for success in later life. Those messages are power ful, and they may intensify already-existing negative pat terns of behavior and self-perception. In addition, in a labor market that demands increasing levels of education and skills to cope with contemporary technology, the economic impact of school "leavers" may be too vast to ignore. One early estimate of the costs in social service, crime prevention, and lost income caused by dropouts was $6 billion per year (Levin, 1972; cited in Rumberger, 1987). Recently, Catterall (1985) suggested that for each school class (e.g., the 1980 sophomore class), approxi mately $228 billion in lifetime earnings was lost because of dropping out. Much of the research on the dropout problem has fo cused upon the characteristics of those who drop out and the factors influencing dropout behavior. Early research on dropouts described them as "misfits" suffering from poor social adjustment, as evidenced by low self-esteem (Beck & Muia, 1980; Cervantes, 1965; Schreiber, 1964). As noted by Pallas (1986), the "social disability" view of dropouts depicts them as having poor social and interper sonal skills and engaging in antisocial behavior. Other re search of that type has documented that dropouts differ from graduates in gender, socioeconomic status (SES), Address correspondence to Edward J. McCaul, National As sociation of State Directors of Education, 1800 Diagonal Road, Suite 320, King Street Station 1, Alexandria, VA 22314. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, March 27-31, 1989.