The Silent Epidemic

Statistics and Facts About High School Drop out Rates

What's at stake:

"Many schools in America can't tell us on any given day who's in school and who's not, nor in any given year how many students have successfully made it through their four years of schooling to graduate and how many have dropped out."

—The Silent Epidemic (PDF)

Every 29 seconds another student gives up on school, resulting in more than one million American high school students who drop out every year
Nearly one-third of all public high school students—and nearly one half of all African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans—fail to graduate from public high school with their class
There are nearly 2,000 high schools in the U.S. where 40 percent of the typical freshman class leaves school by its senior year
The dropout problem is likely to increase substantially through 2020 unless significant improvements are made
Dropouts are more likely than high school graduates to be unemployed, in poor health, living in poverty, on public assistance, and single parents with children who drop out of high school
Dropouts earn $9,200 less per year than high school graduates and more than $1 million less over a lifetime than college graduates
Dropouts were more than twice as likely as high school graduates to slip into poverty in a single year and three times more likely than college graduates to be unemployed in 2004
Dropouts are more than eight times as likely to be in jail or prison as high school graduates
Dropouts are four times less likely to volunteer than college graduates, twice less likely to vote or participate in community projects, and represent only 3 percent of actively engaged citizens in the U.S. today
The government would reap $45 billion in extra tax revenues and reduced costs in public health, crime, and welfare payments if the number of high school dropouts among 20-year olds in the U.S. today, which numbers more than 700,000 individuals, were cut in half