Uneducated effects

X4mr had a post a week ago about the increasing degree of anti-intellectualism in this country, one of the indicators of which is the high school drop-out rate, which is around 25% nation-wide, but up to 50% in the worst urban areas.

So what happens to those drop-outs?

Not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of them are poor, minority and male. In 2001, only 50% of black males, 51% of American Indians and 53% of Latinos graduated within four years. Those numbers do rise as a few more trickle through the system in more than four years.

It becomes a vicious cycle, though. The poor drop out, and the drop outs remain stuck in poverty. Fifty, even 30 years ago it was possible, even without a high-school diploma, to find a job on a factory line somewhere which paid well. A lot has happened since then, however, and many of those jobs have vanished, either to technology, or outsourcing. Today, those jobs don't exist, or if they do they are being held onto with a death grip by the current job occupant, who is desperately hoping the job won't go away as so many others have before he (or she) retires.

Those who do find jobs are generally in the most tenuous of positions. Their jobs are likely to be among the least necessary, and thus first cut, when economic trends angle down rather than up. Just this week it was reported our economic recession saw 80,000 jobs lost in March, and nearly 250,000 since the turn of the year. Those axes, so far, have fallen almost entirely on the uneducated - while the unemployment rate for those with a Bachelor's degree or higher remained flat at about 2.1%, for those without a high school diploma it's reached 8.2%, up from 7.3% in February.

Our military has a target of 90% of first-time enlistees having a high-school diploma. In 2007, for the third straight year, the percentage of recruits who had graduated with a regular high-school diploma declined. Hey, the one's who graduate, at least, aren't stupid - they know there's a war on. Military enlistment figures again failed to meet their goals in terms of raw numbers, which is likely to mean lower standards for recruitment, and maybe the only place where job opportunities for high-school dropouts are rising. Why not send them over to Iraq? It doesn't take a diploma to eat a bullet (or a mortar round, grenade fragment, IED) for the cause.

Without much in the way of job prospects, other means must be found ... 59% of federal inmates and a stunning 75% of state inmates are high school dropouts. I know it's often said half-jokingly, but there is an element of truth - at least in prison they know where their next meal is coming from, they have clothes to wear, shelter. Of course, there are some drawbacks to this as well, such as curfew, lack of freedom, a few other things ...

It would be nice if there were, say, some opportunity available for customized job training to help these individuals learn skills their employers need. For those with a lot of time to read a fascinating account of how this pans out in Tucson, at least, I point you to Something Else.