Facts and Statistics

• Nearly 1 in every 3 public high school students in the U.S. fails to graduate from high school with their class.
• Mississippi’s dropout rate is currently 15.9%; the total number of dropouts is approximately 10,000 students every year.
• Nationwide, a student gives up on school every 29 seconds. That adds up to one million American dropouts every year.
• Nearly 1 in 2 African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans fails to graduate from public high school with their class.
• Dropouts earn about $9,200 less per year than high school graduates. Over a 30-year career, a dropout can $276,000 less than a high school graduate.
• Studies show that dropouts are more than twice as likely as high school graduates to slip into poverty in any given year.
• More than $1.5 billion would be added to the state’s economy by 2020 if students of color graduated at the same rate as white students.
• There are approximately 168,000 high school dropouts on Medicaid in Mississippi, costing the state more than $208 million annually.
• Almost two out of three of all public assistance recipients in Mississippi have been found to be individuals who did not complete high school.
• If the male high school graduation rate increased just 5%, the reduced crime rate and increased earnings would give Mississippi a combined savings and revenue of more than $93 million annually.
• School dropouts are more likely than graduates to go to jail. Past studies have shown that 75% of inmates in state prisons, 59% of federal prisoners and 69% of local jail inmates are high school dropouts.
• Overall, high school dropouts cost the state of Mississippi more than $458 million annually in lost revenue and added public assistance and incarceration costs.