Michigan’s Dropout Crisis

Post written by: Learn and Serve – Michigan Team

This week Learn and Serve – Michigan has been doing a week-long focus on the dropout crisis on our Facebook and Twitter accounts. We have been sharing resources, information, facts, and solutions, in an effort to spotlight the problem and express how service-learning can be one solution to turn this problem around.

Make no mistake, it is a dropout crisis. Every 29 seconds a teen drops out of school. That means nearly 7,000 students drop out each day totaling 1 million students a year. Nearly one third of our public high school students fail to graduate.

The crisis takes a toll here in Michigan. Diplomas Count in 2008 calculated the high school graduation rate for Detroit to be 37.5%, one of the lowest rates in the nation. Michigan has the worst rate nationally for graduating black males, only 34.6%, compared to the national average of 48.2%. We need to find a solution.

But these rates don’t convey the true nature of this problem as high school dropouts have a long uphill battle that plays out over their lifetime. According to the Silent Epidemic, dropouts are more likely than high school graduates to be unemployed, in poor health, living in poverty, on public assistance, and single parents who have children who drop out of school. Every year high school dropouts will earn $9,200 less than high school graduates, missing out on $1 million dollars over their lifetime.

Studies show the lifetime cost for each youth who drops out of school ranges from $1.7 to $2.3 million as a result of the life of crime and drugs dropouts tend to lead. Not only that, but we would reap $45 billion extra in tax revenue and reduced costs of health, crime, and welfare payments simply if the number of dropouts in the Untied States was cut in half.

To Learn and Serve - Michigan these thoughts are troubling. It is difficult to think of people as liabilities to the community instead of assets. It is hard to imagine we are producing so many high school-age youth who will not see the opportunities they deserve. This crisis has to make us rethink the way we are preparing our youth, valuing our youth, and helping them become the future leaders of our community. By engaging and educating them we can help their communities understand they are assets instead of people who drain on their community.

I encourage you follow us for the rest of this week as we look for solutions to this problem and ways to help our youth become the beacons of light instead of the dark underbelly of our community.

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