Event and Status Dropout Rates

Status Dropout Rates

Over the last decade, between 347,000 and 544,000 10th- through 12th-grade students left school each year without successfully completing a high school program. The cumulative effect of these students leaving school each year translates into several million young people who are out of school but lacking a high school credential. Each year over the last decade, this number has exceeded 3 million (table C5). In October 2000, there were 3.8 million 16- through 24-year-olds who were not enrolled in a high school program and had not completed high school (table 3), accounting for about 10.9 percent of the 34.6 million people in this age group. Though there has been a decline in the status dropout rates since the early 1970s, they have remained stable since the late 1980s (figure 2 and table B5). Except where noted, findings presented here are similar to those published in recent NCES annual dropout reports.