Most of the research and commentary on high school dropouts focuses on the negative consequences in the life of the typical dropout. High school dropouts are mulitple times more likely to spend time in jail, struggle with unemployment, commit violent acts...The depressing list goes on. Check out the impressive interactive site set up by Boostup on dropout rates to learn a bit more in this direction. It gets pretty scary and depressing when you focus not only on the consequences of dropping out but on the fact that nearly one in three students drops out in the United States, and nearly one in two in some innercities and rural parts of the country.

What, though, of the positive impacts of preventing a dropout? In other words, instead of focusing on the negative trends that come from dropping out, what can we surmise from focusing on the positive effects of graduating high school. The Alliance for Excellent Education has set up a useful interactive tool of their own, similar to Boostup's above. However, it does something different. It quantifies the impact of dropouts in terms of the lost economic opportunity. Since graduates earn more, society loses the potential economic benefit of a higher earning graduate each time a student drops out of high school. So here in Seattle, for instance, our citizens would earn almost $100,000,000 more each year if we could just cut the dropout rate in half.

So, I'll finish with one last little point relating this issue to Catholic education: Considering the fact that studies have shown that Catholic schools dropout rates nationally are as low as 3% -- certainly not even close to the national 30% -- shouldn't the public be very concerned that Catholic schools in our inner cities are closing at extremely rapid rates (over 1,300 in just the last decade)? With over 2,000,000 students enrolled in Catholic schools in this country, it would seem that the above research points to tens of billions of added earnings caused by the increased graduation rates (lower dropout rates) of Catholic schools.