Losing Ground?

As I wrote a couple of days ago, there's a lot to recommend in the new report about high school graduation rates from the Education Trust (where I used to work). But the media seems a little fixated on the first sentence: "The United States is the only industrialized country in the world in which today’s young people are less likely than their parents to have completed high school."

It's a big dramatic statement, and the New York Times jumped on it in an editorial that ran yesterday, saying:

Americans should be deeply alarmed by new data showing that the country is continuing to lose ground educationally to its competitors abroad. The United States once had the world’s top high-school graduation rate. It has now fallen to 13th place behind countries like South Korea, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Worse still, a new study from the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation, finds that this is the only country in the industrial world where young people are less likely than their parents to graduate high school.

Time magazine picked it up in a story that ran today, saying:

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world where children are now less likely to receive a high school diploma than their parents were, according to an Oct. 23 report by the Education Trust, a children's advocacy group based in Washington.

Two things to keep in mind. First, the statistic comes from the latest batch of education numbers released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD is indeed a collection of industrialized countries. But it's not an organization of all industrialized countries. The table from which this number was pulled includes 29 OECD member countries and six additional "partner economies." It's true that, by one measure, the U.S. is the only member country with a generational decline in high school degree attainment (more on this below). But the comparison list doesn't include Japan, China, India, Taiwan, Iran, South Africa, Argentina and Venezuela, among others. There may be differences of opinion about the meaning of "industrialized," but I'm pretty sure Japan qualifies. Whether high school attainment is stable or rising in every other industrialized country, I don't know. In any case, the phrase "only industrialized country in the world" is over-broad. 

Second, the decline is very small and depends on how you look at it. According to the table, here's the percent of American students graduating from high school by age cohort:

25-34: 87%

35-44: 88%

45-54: 89%

55-64: 86%

While the average age of first-time parents is in the mid-20s, that number has been creeping up over the years.  But (obviously) many people aren't first children, so the average age of anyone's parent at the time of their birth is probably around 30. That means that a person in the 25-34 cohort is likely to have parents in the 55-64 cohort, whose high school attainment percentage is one point lower. I assume the Trust is using the 45-54 cohort, which is two points higher, but that's too young to be parents of most of the 25-34 year olds. Either way, there's not much difference. 

Also, the fact that the numbers are all near 90 percent means that OECD must be counting GEDs, since commonly used measures of on-time high school graduation (like the numbers cited elsewhere in the Ed Trust report) are generally much lower, in the mid-70s. And because people sometimes pick up GEDs later in life, there's some chance that the number for the 25-34 cohort will tick up a percentage point or two as time goes by. 

The chart also shows a drop in high school attainment from the 35-44 cohort in the Russian Federation (which is certainly industrialized)--not at all surprising given the many other measures (e.g. life expectancy) on which Russia is in decline. Say what you want about the Soviet Union, but it was good at getting students through school. 

None of which means that the Education Trust is wrong to say that far too many students are dropping out of high school (particularly low-income and minority students) and that states need to do much more to hold schools accountable for high school graduation rates and support them in efforts to improve. But these kind of alarming statistics tend to take on a life of their own once they're repeated in major media outlets, so it's important to get them exactly right.