The Drop-off in Dropouts

Dear reader,

Last week, we kicked off our series exploring measures of the opposite of violence, with a look at our rates of social connection. When we asked you for forces that restrain and oppose violence, many of the answers you all sent back related to the theme of “opportunity.” Respondents encouraged us to look at pathways to jobs and meaningful work, educational outcomes and other indicators that suggest — as one reader put it — “a sense of a future.”

“When those things are present,” wrote the respondent, who had grown up in the 1980s and 1990s in Camden, N.J., “people have more to protect, more to invest in, and more reason to believe in a different outcome.”

This resonated with what we heard in Camden earlier this year, when Shayla Colon went to the city to investigate how murders had fallen from a record high in 2012 to a 40-year low in 2025. When the city was at its deadliest, people said, kids were afraid to go to school. Many residents associate the city’s violence decline with devoting resources to their uplift. “Violence prevention for me means investing in our youth,” Namibia El, a city resident, said. “If they can’t see their greatness and have appreciation for their culture, then they’ll go ahead and destroy that.”

So this week, we are looking into one particular outcome: the number of kids making it through high school. Read on for Ama Sarpomaa’s reporting on why high school graduation rates have soared to all-time highs in recent years.

— Matthew Thompson

How many students are graduating high school?

In the 2022-23 school year, according to the latest available data from the National Center for Education Statistics, roughly 87 percent of students graduated, an all-time high. It’s a slight uptick from the year before, which also set a record.

Until the 2010-11 school year, there was no standardized nationwide measure of the percentage of students graduating high school. States tracked graduation rates in different ways — some, for example, included students who had dropped out but later received their G.E.D.s. Then the Department of Education mandated the adjusted cohort graduation rate (A.C.G.R.) system, counting “public high school students who graduate on time with a regular diploma.”

Researchers believe graduation rates initially peaked in the late 1960s, then slowly fell until the early 2000s, particularly in urban areas. A slew of research papers in the late ’90s and early 2000s revealed a growing high school dropout crisis.

Graduation rates have historically been lower for students of color, students with disabilities, English learners and low-income students. But the gap between completion rates for white students and students of color in particular has steadily narrowed since the 2000s. The number of graduating Black students increased more than 11 percentage points between 2012 and 2023.

Dr. James Kemple, a senior fellow at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools and research professor at N.Y.U., attributes this rise in graduation rates to a mix of factors, including:

Increased school accountability: The heavily contested No Child Left Behind Act put pressure on high school administrators and teachers to improve academic performance by threatening heavy sanctions, like school closures, on underperforming schools. Previously, students were held accountable for their own academic success. The law — which initially passed under the George W. Bush administration in 2002, but was toughened in 2008 — was met with significant pushback from educators and parents, who argued that it had made teachers “teach to the test.”
Smaller schools: In 2007, Robert Balfanz, who is now the director of Johns Hopkins University’s Everyone Graduates Center, identified about 1,700 large high schools where 9th graders had a 50-50 chance of making it to their senior year. These types of high schools were primarily in big cities and rural areas, and served predominantly minority students. Cities like New York, which had the highest number of these low performing large schools, started shutting them down in the early 2000s.
Changes in the labor market: Until the 1970s, a high school diploma was not a necessary component of many job applications. From the ’80s onward, thanks in part to the changing technology landscape, a higher education degree grew increasingly more valuable, and “the high school diploma was no longer seen as a viable terminal degree,” Dr. Kemple said. Today, education pays like never before.

Are standards slipping?

Some researchers argue that the decades-long increase in graduation rates came in part from decreasing academic standards.

“The general problem with accountability systems of any kind is that they put pressure on schools to increase the metrics,” said Douglas Harris, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an economics professor at Tulane University. “They don’t necessarily incentivize the kind of behavior we’re looking for in the process.”

High schoolers are performing poorly on standardized tests like the ACT and NAEP, while grade-point averages continue to increase. Elementary school test scores are lower than they’ve been in decades. States like South Carolina identified discrepancies between high school graduation rates and college readiness, and introduced bills to target grade inflation.

Compared to other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, students in the U.S. score below average in math, although they score above average in science. Math scores fell by 13 percentage points between 2018 and 2022.

The drop in standardized test scores might be one of the lingering effects of pandemic learning, when schools offered flexible grading and test retakes. Online schooling accelerated absentee rates, and personalized school devices and smartphones have altered how students learn.

Low academic standards may create graduates who perform poorly in college and could ultimately lead to lower pay. Employers and universities have made note of declines in basic math and reading skills, and some are trying to fill in the gaps. Harvard, for example, now offers an introductory math course to address pandemic learning loss.

But can we even truly measure a student’s academic ability by simply looking at standardized test scores? Not according to Dr. Balfanz.

“Scoring proficient on a state exam is a good demonstration of decent-level academic ability,” he said. “But so is taking and passing an AP class.”

College readiness, he said, is a combination of both skill and consistency. And one way to boost academic performance is by catching and addressing early warning indicators like low grades and absences in the ninth grade.

What are the effects?

The bottom line is: More high school freshmen than ever before are making it to graduation day.

That also means more young people are competing for jobs that require some level of educational attainment. About 45 percent of graduating high schoolers in 2022 immediately enrolled in a four-year higher education program. Others enroll in two-year programs or join the work force.

Some college graduates, though, facing what is being called the “grimmest job market in years,” are working high-school-level jobs. The unemployment rates for young college and noncollege workers have also increased.

“Students are aware, intuitively, that this push to excel in school doesn’t pay off in the way we give lip service to,” said Dr. Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

They’re looking around, she said, and asking themselves “why would you be doing well in school, when the jobs that are around you are not the kinds of jobs that people have to do well in school to get.”

It’s not clear what the combination of a weakening labor market, attacks on higher education and K-12, and cuts to the Education Department mean for the future of high school graduation rates. Funding and staffing cuts have already affected the NAEP test. But for now, higher high school graduation rates mean that more students, particularly those from disadvantaged groups, have more pathways to opportunities. And a 2024 report found 73 “launchpad jobs” to improve earnings potential for students who opt to enter the work force directly after high school.

“The good thing is students stayed in school longer, and they probably learned more as a result of that,” Mr. Harris said.

What can I check out next?

More students may be graduating from high school overall, but young men and boys are falling behind their female counterparts on other educational outcomes, including college attendance, Claire Cain Miller reported for The Upshot in May 2025.
The rise of artificial intelligence has also made student cheating much harder to detect, our colleague Dana Goldstein reported last week. (A.I. is also changing how students write, as she reported back in April.)
Declining reading and math scores are beginning to have an impact on the American work force, Sarah Mervosh reported in September. Our colleagues at The Learning Network gathered reactions from many students who are alarmed but not surprised, many blaming technology.
Mississippi schools used to turn out some of the worst scores in the country on national tests. But after adjusting for poverty and other demographic factors, the state is now at the top of the list for fourth-grade reading and math, Sarah Mervosh reports.

— Ama Sarpomaa

Your turn

Test your knowledge: According to a Pew Research Center report from February 2026, what percentage of students aged 13 to 17 used A.I. chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s CoPilot for help with schoolwork?

14 percent

Tell us your thoughts: If you’re a recent graduate, what was your experience getting through high school?And how has it prepared you for the next phase of your life? Do you think there’s a connection between declining violent crime and rising graduation rates? Please email your thoughts to [email protected].

Following up: Several of you raised interesting points in response to last week’s letter about the decline in socializing and communicating. One respondent noted that from her vantage point, “Violence of varying kinds has declined, but who it happens to has changed,” remarking that when violence seemed confined to marginalized communities, it often escaped notice among her middle-class, well-educated colleagues and neighbors. Perhaps that’s another byproduct of violent crime becoming less frequent, but more of a public spectacle — suddenly it seems it can happen to anyone, anywhere.

Another respondent posited a relationship between declining rates of connection and diminishing church attendance. To us, this is another surprising aspect of the general fall in violent crime — much of it has happened at the same time as attendance at religious services was falling.

Several weeks back, we explored why traffic fatalities in the U.S. have been rising in recent years after decades of steady declines. One of the factors, Alexander Nazaryan reported, was “autobesity,” the phenomenon of vehicles getting super-sized. This week, the Times published a visually immersive deep dive into why giant cars and trucks have become so lethal.

Ama Sarpomaa contributed reporting.

The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.

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