Dropout Nation

There is little hope that the Obama Administration’s proposal this week to subsidize community college attendance for any student who enrolls at least part-time and maintains a 2.5 grade point average will be passed in the next two years. The fact that congressional Republicans have made it their goal to keep the administration from attaining anything other than the most-minor of legislative victories means that the plan is dead on arrival; that movement conservatives activists are already criticizing the plan for reasons legitimate and otherwise also make its passage unlikely. Beyond the opposition, there’s also the fact that the administration’s plan will do more for children from middle class households (who can already afford the cost of community college) than for those from poor and minority backgrounds who are denied high-quality education (and thus, opportunities to attain any kind of higher education).

Yet in offering the community college plan, the Obama Administration deserves credit for reminding all of us, especially some reformers who have lost their way, about why all children need to complete higher education: Because the prospects are bleak for high school dropouts and even those high school graduates without some form of higher education.

This reality, emphasized by the Obama Administration plan, was further highlighted yesterday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic with its release of December employment numbers. The news that seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate officially declined by two-tenths of a percent (to 5.6 percent) is belied by the woeful job numbers for dropouts and high school grads who never have never attended (or completed) the traditional colleges, technical schools, and apprenticeships that make up American higher education.

The unemployment for dropouts aged 25 and older of 9.1 percent is just 1.3 percentage points lower than reported numbers for the same period last year. More importantly, the unemployment rate for dropouts is almost double the 4.8 percent rate for high school grads who attended or completed some form of higher education, and four times the 2.7 percent rate for collegians with baccalaureate and graduate degrees. That’s just for the dropouts who are in the workforce: Three-fifths of dropouts aged 25 and older aren’t in the workforce at all — and because of their lack of skills, won’t likely return.

Meanwhile the 5.3 percent unemployment rate for high school grads aged 25 and older without some form of higher education is 1.8 percent lower than in the same period last year. This seems like good news until you keep in mind that more of them are likely to be unemployed than peers who have some higher education and collegians with baccalaureate and graduate degrees. Just as importantly, with 45.4 percent of high school grads without higher education not in the workforce at all, many of them are likely never going to re-enter the workforce anytime in the future.

The long-term prospects for dropouts and high school grads without higher education haven’t gotten better over the last eight years. The unemployment rates for both groups are, respectively, 2.3 percentage points and one percentage point lower than levels in December 2006, just before the financial meltdown that led to the nation’s slowly-retreating economic malaise. Workforce participation rates have also declined; the percentage of high school grads without higher education in the workforce has declined by 5.4 percent within the last eight years.

Since dropouts and high school grads without higher education are among the 2.8 million unemployed for 27 weeks or longer, their prospects for future employment is even dimmer. While there are officially 1.1 million fewer long-term unemployed Americans than in 2013, this is only because of the decision last year by the federal government (resulting from sparring between the administration, Senate Democrats and House Republicans) to not extend unemployment benefits to them. Those out of work for longer than six months still make up 31.9 percent of all unemployed Americans, versus 16.2 percent of unemployed workers in the same period in 2006.

Also keep this in mind: Dropouts and high school grads without higher education also make up many of the 2.3 million so-called marginally attached Americans (or unemployed job-seekers not counted in official unemployment numbers because they usually cannot collect any more jobless benefits and, thus, not considered looking for work); those numbers haven’t improved within the last year and in fact, the number of marginally-attached workers is 1 million more than in the same period eight years ago.

Certainly the hangover from the economic malaise — including the shortcomings of the stimulus efforts undertaken by both the Obama Administration and that of George W. Bush, as well as the consequences of the Affordable Care Act — is one reason why so many dropouts and high school grads without higher education are unemployed. But it isn’t the predominant factor. The reality is that for both groups, their low levels of reading, math, and science proficiency renders them unfit to take on the middle class wage-paying knowledge-based white- and blue-collar jobs in fast-growing sectors. That the industries that used to be their go-tos are either contracting or not growing economically — including construction (which employed 2.5 million fewer employees last year than in 2006) and retail (which employs 1.7 million few workers last year than eight years ago) — means that those dropouts and high school grads who are unemployed will remain so.

This is a problem because high levels of education are key to the poor emerging into the middle class. Twenty-seven percent of households in the lowest 20 percent of income earners were high school dropouts and another 36 percent were high school grads without some form of higher education, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. High school dropouts and high school grads with no college education made up only nine percent of the highest-earning fifth of the nation’s households, and just a quarter of those in the fourth-highest earning fifth of all households. The median weekly wage of $472 for a high school dropout is 35 percent lower than that for a high school graduate with some form of higher education and three-fifths lower than that a high school grad with a baccalaureate; the median weekly wage of $651 for a high school grad without higher education training is half that of a peer with a baccalaureate.

As your editor noted nearly two years ago, lack of higher education is particularly problematic  for workers from poor and minority backgrounds, who are the most-likely to not have been provided high-quality education needed to gain it. After all, black high school dropouts and high school grads without higher ed experience account for 40 percent of all African-Americans in the civilian population age 25 and older and a whopping 58 percent of Latinos; 34 percent of whites and 23 percent of Asians were dropouts and high school grads without college experience. The lower the levels of education in a community, the more-susceptible it is to economic and social distress. Unemployment rates for black high school dropouts 25 and older stood at 20.5 percent in December, 3.8 percentage points higher than at the same time in 2013.

Simply put, higher education is critical for lifelong success in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. But it isn’t just about economics alone. The more children from poor backgrounds attain higher levels of education, the more-likely they are to avoid the pernicious cycle of bad decisions, lack of knowledge, and dearth of resources that keep them in poverty.

As Dropout Nation pointed out last August, higher education is key to keeping young women from falling into out-of-wedlock childhood and ending up in poverty; this is because a longer a young woman is in school, the more-likely she will delay pregnancy until she attains the education needed to gain middle class-paying jobs critical to sustaining marriages and raising children. Higher education also keeps young men out of the school-to-prison pipeline, stopping them from ending up in the woeful economic positions that lead them to makethe kind of desperate decisions to put food on their table that land them in prison, a point highlighted on Thursday by Contributing Editor Michael Holzman in his piece on Chicago’s educational and criminal justice woes. Hoping that earning a high school diploma and avoiding pregnancy alone will keep poor kids out of poverty, an argument offered up by some traditionalists and reformers such as Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (along with the claim that only some children should attend and complete higher education), ignores economic and social reality. Higher education is key to transforming communities and those who live in them.

So the Obama Administration’s theory behind its effort to subsidize community college learning is correct. But it won’t work without addressing two issues. The first? How higher education institutions fail to aid first-generation collegians, many of whom come from poor and minority households that have no previous experience with such matters as annually filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The second: Continually tackling the nation’s education crisis, the underlying reason why just 18 percent of high school freshmen graduate with a baccalaureate by age 25 (and why college graduation rates for children from poor and minority backgrounds are even lower).

This starts with providing all children with the kind of high-quality teaching and comprehensive, college-preparatory curricula and standards children need to attain knowledge needed to succeed in higher education and in career. [The Obama Administration deserves credit for advancing reform efforts on this front, especially through Race to the Top.] This includes continuing the implementation of Common Core reading and math standards, along with overhauling how we recruit, train, compensate, and manage teachers; that Common Core’s standards are higher quality than those most states had in place before its development should give pause to politicians in states such as Tennessee, where fores of Common Core are pushing to halt implementation. Aligning curricula with high-quality standards is also important to making the promise of the standards a reality for our children.

But the focus cannot be on standards, teachers, and curricula alone Districts and other school operators must be held accountable for improving student achievement. This is where the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, which has been weakened substantially by the Obama Administration’s waiver gambit (and could end up being eviscerated altogether if congressional Republicans and traditionalists have their way) come in. By using annual test data to track how districts are educating children, especially those from poor and minority backgrounds, states, families and reformers can advance efforts that will lead to kids getting the knowledge that they need to attain higher education and lifelong success.

Meanwhile we must also provide families with the school choice and Parent Power they need to provide high-quality education to their children. This includes developing data systems that allow for families to make smarter choices, implementing Parent Trigger measures that allow parents to overhaul schools in their own neighborhoods, expanding high-quality charter schools, and launching online learning options. Considering how poorly traditional districts do in providing kids with guidance counselors who can help them stay on the path to higher education success, allowing families to choose alternatives would be helpful.

The Obama Administration’s community college plan won’t become reality. But the proposal, along with the latest unemployment data, is another reminder of the need to help all kids get on the path to higher education and success in an increasingly knowledge-based world.