This article, from the Memphis local daily paper, talks about the cost of someone dropping out of school. There is a personal cost, and a societal cost as well.
High school dropouts earn about 64% of what young adults who do graduate earn. The exact numbers are $17,299 for a dropout, and 26,933 for the graduate. Working an hourly job of 40 hours a week, the difference is $4.63 that the graduate is paid more than the dropout. That’s if the dropout has a job.
Over the lifetime of the dropout, that $4.63 turns into $266,000 of lost wages, because they didn’t see the need for that diploma. That’s the personal cost.
The societal loss is even greater. You have to add in the costs of things like food stamps, and other public assistance programs. Then you have the large amount of dropouts that turn to crime. Incarceration costs Tennessee $23,400 a year per inmate. You also have the female dropouts, that use WIC and public assistance for survival, so they breed like rabbits. At that point you are planting the seeds for another generation who will grow up without hope, without graduating, and extending the problem another 50 years.
So, what can we as a society do about it? Not a lot. We can chain the children and young adults to their seats, but that only causes graduates that can’t read their diplomas. No, the change must come from the society that creates this problem. I’ve talked too many times about what has to happen, and why. I’m blue in the face. The solution is there, plain to see, but no one is willing to do anything but throw money at the symptoms and not address the problem.
What needs to happen is simple. It needs to be drilled into the kids from Kindergarten on how important it is to learn. The minority society must give up the paradigm that having smart people is looked down upon. We must educate the young women about the consequences of having unprotected sex. If we can’t get them to stop, at least use some kind of birth control. Have the young men who get these young women pregnant to step up and take responsibility for what they’ve done. The worst thing done to the minority population was the destruction of the nuclear family. When you have a woman at 21 with no diploma, no future and 4 kids at her feet, all by different fathers, what do you think is going to happen? A repeat of their mothers fate. And they damn the children to another cycle of this.
This is America, and this does not need to happen. There is too much room in the economic pie for 30% of Memphis students to drop out and be relegated to a life of jobs that can be taught with pictograms.
