Four years ago, 148,520 teens began as freshmen at Georgia public high schools. The latest state enrollment data reveals 115,927 of them persisted and will earn their diplomas this week.
So, where are the other 32,593?
Likely on their phones or their parents’ couch. Unfortunately, they’re not on a path to success.
Yes, some of the missing moved out of state. But most dropped out, as indicated by Georgia’s 80 percent graduation rate. That lack of a high school diploma will limit their futures — and the state’s as well.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports weekly median annual earnings in 2017 for a high school dropout were $520; $712 for a high school graduate; and $1,173 for a college graduate. While the unemployment rate for college graduates holding a bachelor’s degree or higher is 2.3 percent, the rate for a high school dropout is more than twice that, 5.7 percent.
A Pew Hispanic Center analysis found three out of 10 white dropouts, two out of 10 of black dropouts and one out of 10 Hispanic dropouts go on to earn a GED. But only about 11.6 percent of GED holders will end up with a college degree.
A Georgia Chamber of Commerce analysis predicts the largest job growth in the state in the next seven years will be health care and professional scientific tech. By 2020, 60 percent of jobs in the state will require some higher education, according to Complete College Georgia. Not all kids need a four-year degree, but most would benefit from some post-high school training or career certification.
A report released recently by Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education and the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy found, while college enrollment by low-income students increased since 1970, gaps persist. In 2016, nearly 78 percent of 18-to-24 year-olds from the highest family incomes enrolled in postsecondary education, compared with 46 percent of those in the lowest.
"While there appears to be some progress, there are many reasons for concern," said Laura Perna, report co-author and director of the alliance. "For example, more black students are attending college, but they are going into more debt to do so. More low-income students are attending college than in years past, but low-income students continue to be concentrated in less selective and for-profit institutions and have lower degree completion rates."
Georgia loses kids at two junctures — enrolling in higher ed in the first place and persisting once they do. High school and college students from low-income families often struggle with barriers to success viewed in the past as outside the scope of the classroom: food, rent money, drug addiction treatment, domestic violence.
Models exist to help students overcome barriers. For example, the Graduate Marietta Student Success Center consolidates school, social services, a food pantry, a clothes closet and a laundromat under one roof to meet more of the needs of at-risk students. It provides tutoring and guidance to struggling students.
Without savvy parents to help them select the right high school courses or nudge them through the higher education bureaucracies, even bright students can stumble. While she was top of her class in her Texas high school and admitted to Harvard, Achieve Atlanta executive director Tina Fernandez lacked the study skills of her better prepared Ivy League classmates, resorting to memorizing all the words in the glossary for her first psychology exam.
“I was lucky enough to have people in my path when I was in college — peers, professors and mentors — who helped me figure it out and it made all the difference,” said Fernandez at a recent panel on rethinking higher education. Her organization seeks to increase the number of Atlanta students completing postsecondary education.
Georgia State University has emerged a national model for shepherding kids through the college maze through a monitoring system that tracks students for 8oo alerts. When those markers are triggered, GSU rushes in with intervention and counseling to keep students on track. As a result, GSU now leads the nation in graduating African-American students.
Every major education advocacy group in Georgia has identified the urgent need to raise high school and college graduation and effective models are emerging. Those models share a common emphasis on recognizing and reaching out to at-risk students in systematic and holistic ways. Both k-12 and higher education in Georgia must build on those models so we can get more kids off their parents’ couches and into postsecondary classrooms.
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