The Cost of Dropouts to Society?

NPR ran a story entitled "Helping Dropouts Break the Cycle of Poverty." It's an enlightening glimpse at the lifetime earning potential for those who don't finish high school compared with those who do. It's quite scary, actually, to consider just what an expensive world we have created. Here are some of the numbers:

By the Numbers:

- 75 percent of state prison inmates and 59 percent of federal inmates are high-school dropouts.

- High-school dropouts are 3.5 times more likely than graduates to be incarcerated.

- Dropouts contribute disproportionately to the unemployment rate. In 2001, 55 percent of young adult dropouts were employed, compared to 74 percent of high-school graduates and 87 percent of college graduates.

- Dropouts contribute to state and federal tax coffers at about one-half the rate of high-school graduates. Over a working lifetime, a dropout will contribute about $60,000 less.

- The 23 million high-school dropouts aged 18-67 will contribute roughly $50 billion less annually in state and federal taxes.

- Studies suggest the United States would save $41.8 billion in health care costs if the 600,000 young people who dropped out in 2004 were to complete one additional year of education.

- If 33 percent of dropouts graduated from high school, the federal government would save $10.8 billion each year in food stamps, housing assistance, and temporary assistance for needy families.

- Testifying before Congress, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said dropouts cost the United States "more than $260 billion... in lost wages, lost taxes and lost productivity over their lifetimes."

Equally revealing in the statistics is the perspective of how much under-educated citizens actually cost the government. This thought has crossed my mind before, in particular when I was reading about remnants of hunter-gatherer tribes in Kenya during the British imperial age. It was pretty clear at that time that the British government gained much more collectively from making the tribes literate and integrating them into the economic system (at the lowest levels, of course). Most dropouts in America today would never survive as hunter-gatherers, so, of course, education is essential to moving people out of poverty. Let's not forget, however, how much our government depends on higher wage-earners.

What is interesting about that fact is how high the barrier of entry is for children of underpriveleged homes. Even State universities are upgrading their admissions requirements, making it harder than ever for many students to even get a shot at a good education.