Dropping out of high school is a killer


  • July 10, 2015
  • /   Reggie Dogan
  • /   education

You’ve all heard the bad news about high school dropouts: It’s hard for them to find jobs, and when they find them, they earn less money than high school graduates.

Studies also show that dropouts are more likely to have shorter life spans, depend on public assistance and end up in jail than high school graduates.

Now come a new study that says not finishing high school also can be deadly.

The failure to get a diploma has been linked to a surprisingly large percentage of premature deaths, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Colorado, New York University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The study, which was published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, looked at the relative risk of death among people with various levels of education and compared that with the distribution of educational attainment across the U.S. population, according to The Atlantic magazine.

Using survey data from the Centers for Disease Control to assess how education levels affected mortality over time, the researchers concluded that, using the educational disparities observed among people born in 1945, the deaths in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of American adults could have been prevented if those people had gotten high-school or bachelor’s degrees, the report says.

Specifically, the deaths of roughly 145,000 individuals were associated with those individuals’ failure to get a high-school degree, while the deaths of another 110,000 or so people were attributed to those adults failing to complete their four-year degree programs.

Read 'When Dropping Out of School is a Deadly Decision' here.

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