Upside of a downturn: Dropouts drop back in

JoNel Aleccia Health writer • E-mail

ELKHART, Ind. - Grades in the gutter, cutting classes, expelled from Elkhart Central High School for fighting: Yamilette Colon was as close to becoming a dropout as a ninth-grader can get.

“I’m not even going to lie to you, I was bad,” said Colon, who admits she had a knack for attracting trouble.

Three years later, though, Colon, now 18, is an alternative school honor student on track for a May diploma, spurred in part by a sense of self-pride, but also, she says, by the economic calamity that has shuttered plants, claimed jobs and dimmed the future for many young people in this hard-hit county dubbed the “RV Capital of the World.”

“It’s a huge factor,” Colon said. “It comes down to, the longer you stay in school, the more education you get, the more money you make.”

That’s a big shift in attitude in a community where 24 percent of adults older than 25 have less than a high school education, where only 66 percent of students graduate from high school in four years, and where generations of kids dropped out because it was always easy to find a decent job.

But in Elkhart and across the country, education leaders say they’re seeing what may be one bright spot in the dismal downturn: more students opting to stay in — or return to — school.

“I’m hearing kids clinging to their education as the economy gets worse,” said Clyde Riley, principal at the Tipton Street Center alternative school, where Colon is one of 240 students in a district that serves some 13,500.

Here and elsewhere, long waiting lists for adult education and GED — General Education Development — classes, spiking enrollments at community colleges and, perhaps, a surge in returns by high-school dropouts and a decline in those who leave in the first place, may all point to a renewed focus on education, experts say.

“If there’s anything good to come out of this recession, it’s to make educational lemonade out of these lemons,” said Bob Wise, the former West Virginia governor who now heads the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national policy and advocacy group.

When times are tough, kids stay in school
It’s too early for data to validate any shift in graduation or dropout rates related to the bad economy, Wise said, although he and others expect some improvement as early as next fall.

Some experts say that both research and common sense suggest that when times are tough, kids are more likely to stay in school. Two studies included in a review of 25 years of research on reasons students drop out found that states with higher unemployment rates had lower dropout rates and higher graduation rates, said Russ Rumberger, a professor of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara and director of the California Dropout Research Project.

One state study estimated that for every 1 percentage point rise in the unemployment rate, the contemporary dropout rate fell by 5 percent, the research showed.

“It’s what economists call an ‘opportunity cost.’ You don’t have a lot of other options,” Rumberger said. “It makes college more attractive and it makes it the same for high school.”

That message has been underscored, Rumberger and others say, by support from the top: President Obama’s $141 billion boost to education through the federal stimulus plan and his recent assertion that “dropping out of high school is no longer an option.”

Interactive map High-school graduation rates See how your state compares to others. msnbc.com

“It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country, and this country needs and values the talents of every American,” Obama said in a February speech to a joint session Congress.

Some critics say it’s far too optimistic to expect a recession to affect the intractable problem that leads to an estimated 1.2 million dropouts — or nearly a third of the nation’s graduating class in the U.S. each year.

“Unless we’re changing the support systems for schools, we’re not going to see a change,” said Jonathan Plucker, director of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Even in Elkhart, Central High principal Frank Serge notes that students don't traditionally drop out for financial reasons, or think far enough ahead about the very real long-term consequences of their choices.

But the severity of the current downturn may change that, Wise observed, making education a priority fueled by a very practical reality.

“This is the first recession that truly discriminates based on education,” he said.

More education, better income
March unemployment figures from the federal Bureau of Labor bear that out. The overall unemployment rate was 8.5 percent, but it was 13.3 percent among people 25 and older with less than a high school diploma and 9 percent among high school-only graduates. For those with some college, it was 7.2 percent and for those with a bachelor’s degree or better, the rate fell to 4.3 percent.

Those differences typically translate into greater income overall, with a high school dropout earning about $260,000 less on average during a lifetime than a high school graduate, Wise noted.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, an American worker with less than a high school education can expect to earn an average annual salary of $19,000 a year, compared to $26,200 for a high school-only graduate  and $42,200 for a worker with a bachelor's degree.

In Elkhart County, where the unemployment rate hit 18.8 percent in March, the paycheck-boosting need for new skills has become more than obvious, said Deb Weaver, director of community education for the Elkhart Area Career Center.

She had to halt orientations for GED classes last summer because of long waiting lists. When they resumed this year, 139 people showed up for 100 slots.

Most of the more than 700 students Weaver serves now are unemployed workers in their late 20s to mid-40s who never finished school. Increasingly, though, younger students, those 16 to 24, understand earlier than ever that they need the credential.

“They have 90 stories about why they dropped out,” said Weaver. “But for all of them now, it’s regrets, regrets, regrets.”

Carissa Ray / msnbc.com Paige Bowers, 18, works at a tanning salon while she focuses on getting her GED.

Paige Bowers, 18, of Elkhart, enrolled in GED classes soon after leaving Elkhart Central at the end of her junior year following a classroom fight that left her dreading school. She got a job making $6.55 an hour at a local tanning salon, but hopes to go to college — maybe in Elkhart, maybe in Texas or California — and she said she knew it was important to finish.

“You don’t just want to be a dropout and have nothing going for you,” said Bowers. “I’m not dumb.”

Ashley Van Wormer, 20, of Elkhart, returned to complete a GED program four years after she dropped out of nearby Jimtown High School because she was pregnant. She later married the baby’s father, Chad Van Wormer, 21, who got a GED certificate after dropping out of Concord High School four credits shy of a diploma.

John Brecher / msnbc.com Ashley Van Wormer, 20, studies for a GED test in the company of her 1-year-old daughter, Payton, in Elkhart, Ind.

The young mother of Braydon, now 4, and his sister, Payton, 1, says she doesn’t regret leaving school so early to have children, but she wants to make sure to set a good example.

“I want to be someone my kids can look up to and I want to feel good about myself,” said Van Wormer, who hopes to train to become an ultrasound technician. “I want them to have a great life, get through schooling, have their lives set so they don’t have to worry about anything.”

Long waiting lists for GED classes
Returning students are having to wait longest in hard-hit places like Elkhart, and Saginaw, Mich., where 1,000 people can’t yet get into adult education classes, according to Dianne Duthie, director of lifelong learning in the state’s Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth.

But adult education experts say the numbers are spiking in a country where about 676,000 students took GED tests in 2006.

‘Why I dropped out’ Students drop out of high school for a range of reasons, including lack of interest in the curriculum, discipline problems, troubled at home and pregnancy. Following are answers to a written survey filled out by students who dropped out and returned for a GED credential from the Elkhart Area Career Center. "One word: STUPID. I was just 16 and thought I already knew what I needed. I quit, got a job at restaurant doing dishes for $1.50 per hour, only 15 hours a week. When I look back now, I was just stupid. ... I guess I felt I was lifting some weight off of dad with one less in school." — "Got in with the wrong crowd of people. Started getting distracted and stopped paying attention to my work. Then my junior year was over and I tried to get into the alternative school and I never heard from them about an opening." — "I was more interested in having fun. School wasn't fun. I didn't want any part of it at the time." — "A number of reasons. I felt, at the time, l had better things to do. Another reason is that I was bored. I didn't feel like I was being challenged. In school I wasn't an individual. I was just another student. There wasn't much help if I needed it. No one-on-one time. Also, at the time, no one else cared, why should I? School was just a place to hang out with your friends for six hours. No one showed me how to take it seriously. — "The main reason I dropped out is because I got pregnant and had to get a job so I could have everything for the baby when he came." — "Because I didn't like school." Source: Elkhart Area Career Center

In Arizona, the number of people taking the GED tests in the first few months of 2009 climbed 9 percent over the first few months of 2008, a rate nearly double previous growth, said Karen Liersch, deputy associate superintendent of adult education services at the state’s education department.

At the same time, enrollment in adult education classes was up 21 percent from 2007 to 2008, and projected  to rise another 17 percent this year, she said.

Increases are also being logged in states from Georgia and Alabama to Delaware and Missouri, said Lennox McLendon, president of the National Adult Education Professional Development Consortium.

“They say people are just beating down the doors, especially in places where there have been layoffs,” he said.

Community college enrollments up
That surge has been matched by a rise in community college enrollments in Elkhart and elsewhere.

At the Elkhart campus of Ivy Tech, a statewide system of community colleges, enrollment is up more than 24 percent than this time last year, a record, said Tracie Davies, a spokeswoman. In the north-central Indiana region, it's up by a record 15.8 percent as well.

Nationally, firm data about enrollment is not yet available, but informal polls suggest numbers began to rise last fall and have continued to climb, said Norma Kent, a spokeswoman with the American Association of Community Colleges.

A survey of 100 schools in March showed numbers are up over the previous year from 4 percent to as much as 27 percent at one Louisiana community college, Kent said.

The reason is obvious, said Marguerite Kondracke, chief executive officer of America’s Promise Alliance, a collaborative agency aimed at boosting achievement among children and youth. She’s been conducting “dropout summits” in all 50 states and in 55 cities with the greatest concentration of low-performing schools, using the economic downturn to call attention to the need for education.

“A high school graduate could count on a factory job or a Rust Belt job, but no longer,” Kondracke said.

Anecdotally, Kondracke has heard of boosts in dropout reenrollment rates and in hints of graduation rate improvements linked to the downturn. She believes that the hard times will accelerate education as a priority.

“The economic crisis creates a sense of urgency and it forces us to focus on things we should have been doing all along,” she said.

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