Once upon a time, a high school diploma was a big deal - my mother was the only one in her family to earn one. But the world of the Class of '50 was quite different from the world of today. Her brothers did have jobs (tho not careers) until each wound up on disability.
Meanwhile, thanks to social promotions, we have high school graduates who can barely read and do basic calculations, so I’m thinking that getting to graduation is probably easier today than in my day (Class of '72) or my mom’s day, and still you have kids who won’t stick it out.
Laziness aside, because there will always be those who look for the easy way out of everything, can anyone offer me any reasons to quit high school that make any sense? I imagine at one time, a teen might have had to drop out to help work the farm because Dad got hurt, but how much financial help can a kid without a diploma provide to the family these days?
Are dropouts really clueless and lazy or am I missing something here in my empty nest?
Due to physical disability and health problems my spouse spent a lot of his school years in the hospital. While most of his teachers accepted his in-hospital work and tutoring, he had one history teacher who absolutely refused to pass him as he wasn’t physically in the classroom. The result would have been him needing to take a fifth year of high school to get his diploma.
So he “dropped out” by taking the GED test and getting that piece of paper. A few months later he entered college, rather than spending yet another year in high school.
I also know a young woman who was emancipated at the age of 16 or 17 and dropped out in order to get a job in order to put a roof over her head and food on her table. She, too, wound up taking the GED. I don’t know if she ever went on to college or not, there was a lot of messed up stuff in her life, but basically, being without any parents to support her, she dropped out to get a job she needed to keep from being homeless.
And finally, I know someone who started a business at 16 and dropped out to run it. I didn’t keep in contact with him but by his early 20’s he was employing several other people and making 5 figures, back in the early 80’s when that was a decent sum. Was that a good idea or not? I don’t know, but if the purpose of getting an education is securing a decent living he apparently succeeded without needing an advanced degree.
So… yes, I think in rare cases dropping out of high school is at the very least justifiable.
If your home life is horrible, dropping out and getting a GED could make sense.
Also if you are in a band that just got signed to a major label and they want to go on tour, I could see why dropping out would be a good idea. It happened to Tommy Lee of Motley Crue with his HS diploma. He made the right decision. Same thing happened to Dexter Holland of the Offspring while he was working on his PhD. Good decision there too. Of course that happens rarely.
Plus if you get pregnant it could be hard to juggle responsibilities. Or if you have to work full time for whatever reason, juggling that and school can be difficult.
Part of it is culture, poverty and location. In some schools the dropout rate is very low, in others it approaches 50%.
Since academics and IQ are correlated, and IQ has been going up due to the Flynn effect I don’t think you can ascribe the higher education rates to making education easier. We are also getting smarter, which would result in more education in general. I have heard the opposite from some people wrt higher education, the courses are harder than 50 years ago.
I dropped out of high school because after years of incessant bullying I could finally, legally, GTFO. So I did.
ETA: Yes, it was obvious to everyone both at school and at home that I was suffering and being traumatised, no-one was prepared to do shit about it, so I did the only thing I could do.
My youngest is autistic to the point where he’s never going to have a professional career anyway. So what good is a HS diploma going to do him?
Before I was happy to let him go to school because he was learning. He still is actually. Except when it comes to math. They’ve got him doing algebra when he can’t even do long division. And you can’t blame the teachers for any of this because by law, they are required to teach him algebra regardless of his disability.
Stupid Texas school system.
Oh well, at least he’s doing well in history and biology.
That was pretty much my story in West Texas. As soon as I turned 17, right after my junior year, I just left. My parents didn’t even care. I sort of wish I’d finished, but I spent several years bumming around getting “life experiences” that I look back on with some degree of fondness, and I did finally earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from two major universities. Imagine my astonishment when I discovered in my mid-20s that I didn’t really need a high-school diploma to get into university after all. I think I took some sort of test, definitely not for the GED, but something that substituted for the SATs in order to be admitted. I think it was the ACT?
It depends on how badly off the family is, really. My brother-in-law dropped out because his mother wouldn’t have been able to earn above minimum wage, which would not have supported him , her and his much younger half-sister and also covered day-care for the sister. If he dropped out and worked, there was no need for day-care. But I’m sure that’s a fairly rare situation.
I have a friend who had a pretty unhappy home life. He worked in his fathers business since he was very small. He hated highschool and dropping out and going to work full time for the old man gave him a chance o learn the business and a reason to get up in the morning and stop getting high all day.
Today he owns the business, he’s expanded the business 3 fold and is very successful and happy.
If your parents give you written permission to drop out before age 18, you can take your GED, start taking classes at community college, and have time to work and make money, rather than wasting another two years of your life in high school waiting to graduate and take out loans to go for 4 years to a prestigious college. I know a couple smart kids who did this back when we were in high school (10 years ago now), both graduated college earlier than average and one is now a professor (the other is doing something with computers, which is not what his degree was in but it seems to make him good money).
This isn’t a “at one time” thing. Still today, it’s not at all uncommon to find a kid who is working to pay family bills because a parent or parents are unemployed, underemployed, or unemployable. I have had any number of students who have dropped out because they found it too difficult to balance 40+ hours of work a week plus a full school day. Now, others have been successful in doing so, so it’s possible, but it’s hard: I wouldn’t call the ones who don’t manage it “lazy”.
Also, frankly, when you came to this country at 13 and have no hope of ever being able to work legally, the utility of a high school diploma is pretty limited. These kids aren’t dropping out to look for a job: they are dropping out because they have a job. They aren’t thinking long-term because they don’t have that luxury: they want to keep a roof over their head next week. Their only career plan is to advance about two steps in whatever it is they are currently doing, and not having a diploma is probably not a deal-breaker.
Now, the really savvy kids find a way to reduce their school load without dropping out entirely: they get early release or late arrival (you wouldn’t believe how many of my female students clean offices in the wee hours), the strip their graduation plan down to the minimum, and they finish. But a lot of them feel trapped and hopeless and sorry for themselves–understandably–and so they just break one day and drop out. We, as an institution, probably should be better about helping these kids: we tend to push them to stay in school full time, to take advanced courses if they can, to try to do it all. And for many, that’s not reasonable.
If someone like Nick d’Aloisio wanted to drop out of high school, it’s certainly up to him. (He’s the 17 year old entrepreneur who created a news-delivery app and recently sold it for approximately $30m.)
It depends on if you mean “drop out” to indicate “end of formal classroom education.” If you aren’t going to get any kind of degree or trade-school certificate or equivalent, yes, I think that piece of paper is critical to success - if not immediately, then around 30 when you have to start proving yourself in “real jobs” - like supervisor, manager, senior something or another, etc.
If you’re bailing on high school to move on in your educational ladder, no problem, as long as you mean it. Both myself and Mrs. Barbarian blew out of high school in two years. Three degrees and somewhere between three and six professional careers between us, and we semi-retired at 50 to look into new career directions.
High school tends to be an overrated joke, and I counseled all of my kids to do well but not believe that any of it would be important by the August after they graduated, no matter how life-defining it seemed in the third year. Diplomas are watered-down rubber stamps… but in the end, if that’s all you’re going to get, it will be valuable beyond measure in those early-middle years, if not in getting a better starting job.
Obviously, at least to my mind, I was thinking in terms of kids who just quit and that’s the end of their education. I didn’t think about neglectful/abusive/indifferent parents, although I know my daughter deals with that among her 5th graders. :smack: I had considered in the instance of severe bullying, a student might decide to get out, but I hadn’t thought about quitting, getting a GED, then going to college.
Some years back, my daughter was dating a boy whose parents and grandparents were encouraging him to drop out within 3 or 4 months of graduation and take the test to work at the Post Office. I couldn’t wrap my head around that. He did graduate, tho.
Interesting examples in this thread - lots of situations I hadn’t thought about. Too sheltered, I guess…
I dropped out of high school in 11th grade because I felt like I was wasting my time.
By the way, I went to a badly funded public school. I really hate it when people say it isn’t a waste of time because their school wasn’t. Seriously, the teachers did not care to teach. They read directly out of the book or spent most of the period disciplining disruptive kids. Our ‘projects’ included things like coloring and other nonsense.
I got my GED, learned the basics of English composition, mathematics (to calculus), history, and other subjects myself. I’ve been going to community college for 2 years and have a 4.0 GPA.
I’m transferring to Washington University next semester to study biochemistry.
It is so laughable that people think I was lazy or made the bad choice. For me, it is absolutely the right choice if you are getting nothing out of high school. I saved a year of my life and retained a lot more of my sanity than I would have if I had stayed.
[edit] By the way, I realize you weren’t talking about my situation, but a LOT of people do assume things like that about me so I figured I’d share.
I’d have to think more about dropping out and stopping education there. I’m not sure if there’s a good reason for it but I tend not to judge people unless I know their personal situation.
If you’re looking for stories about people who dropped out and never pursued further education; that’s me. Left at 18, never got my GED, and I have supported myself for a decade doing a variety of jobs; waiting tables, bartending, doing office work and sales (for a small business owner who dropped out of HS himself), childcare, massage, teaching yoga (paid for training and certification to do both), various retail positions, figure modeling. I’m making decent money right now, more than plenty of people I know using their college degrees. I don’t regret dropping out, as school was torture for me. My lack of high school diploma is a non-issue as employers never seem to look at the education portion of my resume, and most assume I have a BA like many of my coworkers.
However it wasn’t a ‘smart decision’ and there are many avenues I can’t pursue without a diploma.
As a qualifier, I think dropping out is a personal decision and one that can be looked at as good or bad. The context being the important thing. I also believe that we live only once and who am I to tell someone how to live? I would say that, for the most part, that getting a HS diploma is beneficial.
All of that out of the way, I’m always curious when someone drops out at 18. Maybe it’s due to my misperception (and I don’t know your situation), but at 18, it seems like you only have a few more months of school, so why not just complete it? Again, it’s definitely important to have context (which I don’t have). So if you don’t mind sharing, why did you drop out so close to graduating?
I think in the general case, it’s very important to stay in and graduate. It’s pretty clear from these maps that education and income are very strongly associated with each other (and unfortunately, with race as well).
That being said, there are obviously going to be exceptions, and that’s what most of the people mentioned in this thread are.
I tend to think that most of the high school dropouts are either colossally stupid, they come from a family that doesn’t value education, or their home lives are so bad that dropping out and taking that chance is still probably the best choice.
By “colossally stupid” I don’t mean special needs or anything like that- I mean those knuckleheaded fuckups who drop out because they want to party more and who have no concept of the future.
I knew a girl in high school who dropped out around her junior year due to health problems. Can’t remember what she had, maybe Epstein-Barr? This was in the mid-90s.