High School Completion Rates

Region and State

Consistent with findings for status dropout rates by region, young adults in the Northeast and Midwest had higher completion rates than their contemporaries living in the South and West (table 4). Approximately 89 percent of young adults in the Northeast and Midwest had completed high school compared with 84.4 percent in the South and 85.5 percent in the West.

Interest in geographic comparisons often extends beyond the regional level to state-specific data. In order to compare high school completion on a state-by-state basis, completion rates are computed based on data spanning a 3-year period ²³. The 1998-2000 averages show considerable state-by-state variation (figure 4 and table B9). The 1998-2000 national completion rate was 85.7 percent, with the average completion rates ranging from 73.5 percent in Arizona to 94.5 percent in Maine.

However, even with aggregating across three years of data, the standard errors for the state estimates are quite large, so large that state-to-state comparisons are difficult. Figure 4 includes error bars (representing the 95 percent confidence level) along with point estimates for the state completion rates. For example, in the first line in the figure, Arizona's completion rate is represented by the symbol |-·-|. The · represents the estimate of the three-year average completion rate for Arizona (73.5 percent). The error bars surrounding the · represent the 95 percent confidence interval around that estimate. Therefore, with a probability of 95 percent, Arizona's completion rate lies somewhere between 70.1 percent (the lower bound) and 76.9 percent (the upper bound). As one can see from this figure, the confidence intervals for most states' completion rates overlap, making many distinctions among states' completion rates unreliable. For example, the difference between Mississippi's completion rate (82.3 percent) and Nebraska's rate (91.3 percent) is not statistically significant. ²⁴