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#2005-07: State-Level High School Completion Rates: Concepts, Measures and Trends
Author: John Robert Warren, Department of Sociology, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota
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ABSTRACT: I review state-level measures of high school completion rates, and describe and validate a new measure that reports these rates for 1973 through 2000. Existing measures based on Current Population Surveys are conceptually imperfect and statistically unreliable. Measures based on Common Core Data (CCD) dropout information are unavailable for many states and have different conceptual weaknesses. Existing measures based on CCD enrollment and completion data are systematically biased by migration, changes in cohort size, and grade retention. The new CCD-based measure described here is considerably less biased, performs differently in empirical analyses, and gives a different picture of the dropout situation across states and over time. Since the early 1970s the rate at which incoming 9th graders have completed high school has fallen consistently. In 2000, about two thirds of students who might have completed high school actually did so.