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Between 2014 and 2026, nearly 1.6 million students will enter the state’s K-12 public school system as ninth graders. Under current graduation rates, more than 213,000 of them are predicted to drop out or delay high school graduation. Let’s break it down further. For every 100 ninth graders that start public high school in NC: 86 graduate high school within 4 years. 14 dropout or take more than 4 years to complete high school. In…
Successfully attaining a high school diploma is a necessary step in the transition to either college or gainful employment. Earning a high school equivalency credential, like the GED, is not the same as a high school diploma. Compared to high school graduates, individuals with a GED earn less in the labor market and are less likely to go to college. The high school diploma is more than an indicator of academic knowledge; it is also a barometer of the individual’s capacity to stick with a task and other soft skills that may be harder to quantify.
On February 20, the myFutureNC Commission announced a statewide attainment goal: by 2030, 2 million North Carolinians age 25-44 will hold a postsecondary degree or nondegree credential. This represents a 67% postsecondary attainment rate for this age group in 2030, a seventeen percentage point increase over the current attainment rate for this age group (50% in 2017). https://youtu.be/YU4CKSkcGSM This goal was set because recent trends in educational attainment are insufficient to meet projected demands for…
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) regularly releases data summarizing selected school performance measures. The four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate is calculated by dividing the number of regular high school diplomas earned within four-years (“on-time”) by an “adjusted cohort.” The adjusted cohort begins with all individuals who entered 9th grade four years previously. It then adds to this group all individuals who transferred in between Grade 9 and graduation and subtracts students who transferred…
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