$130,000 for a 67% failure rate

Measurement, perspective and context are three critical elements in decision-making. Slight changes in any one of the elements can tilt decisions in different directions.

Yesterday I was thinking about challenges faced by our local school board. I began to quantify the issues which led down the following chain of analysis. This is just a back of the envelope calculation and the numbers are pulled from memory but I am pretty confident they are within 5% accuracy. It also ignores a lot of nuances. For example, if you drop out of high school, it doesn't mean that your life is a failure, it is simply an indication that goal attainment is going to be that much harder.

The macro picture, the context, is important though. As a society we know that all good outcomes are contingent on productivity and productivity is tightly tied to successful education attainment and to full time employment. The life outcomes for those people and countries with low levels of employment and low levels of education attainment are generally quite bleak from a statistical perspective, and certainly their range of choices are quite circumscribed.

My local school board, as I suspect do most school boards, has the stated objective of graduating students college-ready or employment-ready. Good so far.

Much attention, appropriately, gets paid to the low graduation rate. While there are some dramatically poorly performing school districts out there, I think the national average is in the area of 70% of students graduate on time and 30% fail to graduate at all or take a GED equivalent.

But that's not the whole story. While contributive, graduation rate doesn't tell you how well a school system is doing in terms of its measurable goal of college and work ready.

You have to know how many graduates go on to work and how many choose to pursue higher education. I believe the current split is about 60% go on to higher education and 40% go directly into the workforce. So how well do new graduates do in terms of completing a college education and how many are able to find jobs?

The national late teen unemployment rate is around 25%. Approximately 45% of HS graduates who enroll in higher education fail to complete their degrees within six years. That means that of all HS graduates, 30% fail to graduate; 27% fail to complete their higher level education; 10% fail to find employment. Cumulatively, against the goal of graduating all 18 year olds college or work ready, that means that we are only graduating 33% that are indeed college or work ready. In other words, there is a 67% failure rate in the stated objective of graduating all student college or work ready. And for this, we, as a nation, pay $650 billion dollars a year, $10,000 per year per student. In aggregate we pay $130,000 to educate each student up to the point where 67% of them fail to graduate, fail to work or fail to successfully complete higher education.

When you strip out all the noise and distractions, this is a pretty stark picture. In what other industry would we accept a 67% failure rate in return for a $130,000 expenditure, particularly for a critical investment that is so predictive of life outcomes? All the noise about the 1%, income inequality, economic mobility, disparate impacts, etc. all track back to this fundamental failure to prepare children for work and for education. Obviously there are myriad root sources for the failure but complexity of fixing the problem does not vitiate the need to focus clearly on the root cause and not get distracted by all the rabbits set running.