Here’s an eye-opening study from the Alliance for Excellent Education. It says that if every student in the class of 2005-2006 graduates from high school, the nation could save $17.1 billion in lifetime health costs. The conclusion comes from its recent brief, Healthier and Wealthier: Decreasing Health Care Costs by Increasing Educational Attainment, funded by MetLife Foundation.
From the study: “Healthcare costs are highest for the least educated, so the Alliance calculated savings by combining the lifetime costs of Medicaid and expenditures for uninsured care, then multiplying this total by the number of students who drop out of high schools. If these students were to graduate instead, the nation would realize a significant benefit.”
I’d be interested to hear from those of you with experience in secondary education. From my two-year stint, I found that crappy parents have kids that are interested in little that is useful. But I did sense that these “underachievers” were looking for role models. The kids will find them, whether good or ill. So the research findings may be stimulus to reexamine the structure of high-school education. Here’s one area where more math and science is probably not the answer.