State-level high school completion rates: Concepts, measures, and trends.

Abstract

Since the mid 1970s the national rate at which incoming 9th graders have completed high school has fallen slowly but steadily; this is also true in 41 states. In 2002, about three in every four students who might have completed high school actually did so; in some states this figure is substantially lower. In this paper I review state-level measures of high school completion rates and describe and validate a new measure that reports these rates for 1975 through 2002. Existing measures based on the Current Population Survey are conceptually imperfect and statistically unreliable. Measures based on Common Core Data (CCD) dropout information are unavailable for many states and have different conceptual weaknesses. Existing measures based on CCD enrollment and completion data are systematically biased by migration, changes in cohort size, and/or grade retention. The new CCD-based measure described here is considerably less biased, performs differently in empirical analyses, and gives a different picture of the dropout situation across states and over time.

The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels

“…For the first time, alternative credentials, such as General Educational Development (GED) certificates and certificates of attendance, were to be explicitly excluded from state and local graduation calculations (United States Congress [2001]). 5 Using the new definition of who is a high school graduate, many scholars claim that the United States has a dropout crisis (See Greene [2001], Swanson [2004], Swanson and Chaplin [2003], Miao and Haney [2004] and Warren [2005]). The new school of thought is that the true graduation rate is substantially lower than the rate that had been reported for years by the NCES and other governmental agencies.…”

“…However, contrary to the status completion rate, the graduation ratio estimates peak at 77 percent in 1969 and then slowly declined until suddenly reversing the long-time trend starting in 2002. 3 A number of recent studies question the validity of the status completion rate and attempt to develop more accurate estimators of high school graduation rates (See Greene [2001], Swanson [2004], Swanson and Chaplin [2003], Miao and Haney [2004] and Warren [2005]). Heated debates about the levels and trends in the true high school graduation rate have appeared in the popular press.…”

Migration and Graduation Measures

“…This distortion becomes more pronounced if the numerator includes special-education certificates (because some students in special education remain in school until 22). BCR 9 and BCR 8 include no adjustment for migration or mortality, but Warren's (2005) formula is related to BCR 8 .…”

“…The second is the existence of international migration of teens who never enroll in school. In states with a relatively high unenrolled teen immigrant population (such as California), the Census Bureau estimates will deflate the adjustment factor and the overall measure, as Warren (2005) notes. Seastrom, Hoffman, et al (2006) use a formula that is a variant of Greene and Winter's (2002) earlier, unadjusted measure of graduation, with a smoothing to estimate first-time ninthgrade enrollment.…”

“…As Warren (2005) and Mishel and Roy (2006) point out, estimates of state and national graduation adjusted by the Census Bureau single-year estimates of population are likely to underestimate graduation from U.S. schools because some proportion of international teenage migrants enter the U.S. but never enroll in school. In addition to international migration, internal migration moves students between schools as they move between states, districts, and neighborhoods.…”