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High

School Dropout Rates


And the Effect of Poverty
Scott James Jackson
ECON 388, Dr. J. B. McDonald Winter 2010

HIGH SCHOOL DROP-OUT RATES AND POVERTY


SCOTT JAMES JACKSON
This paper uses a regional-level data set compiled from 50 US states detailing high school drop-out rates in the year 2005 to test the hypothesis that poverty levels are inversely related with high school graduation rates. Four indicators of poverty gathered are used to observe this effect: unemployment rates, poverty levels, percent population with Associates Degrees, and the fraction of the work force involved in manufacturing or extraction industries. The results reveal that of these, only unemployment rate is statistically significant in influencing high school drop-out rates, with a 1% increase in unemployment causing a 3% decline in high school graduation rates. These results are tested for adherence to the classical normal linear model assumptions of econometric analysis and they are found to be significant. The policy implications of these findings support incentives for parents to keep their children in school even during what may seem to be short-term economic downturns.

I. INTRODUCTION
The literature on high school drop-out rates is extensive. With such high social import, great interest is placed in any effort to determine the causes of drop-outs, especially in areas that tend to have rates that habitually run abnormally above average. This project came about from a desire to analyze and find solutions to the reportedly high drop-out rates in the city of East Palo Alto, located in the San Francisco Bay area of California. According to much anecdotal evidence and some census reports, the drop-out rate among high school students from this smaller-sized city ranges anywhere between 60 to 80%. This range, while certainly well above the norm and much higher than the desired, is of particular interest because of the unique circumstances of these students and the area. Like most areas with abnormally high drop-out rates, East Palo Alto is a conflagration of many issues which complicate the ability of schools to first, understand, and second, provide, to their student bodies. For East Palo Alto, these factors include high levels of minority ethnicities, a large percentage of the population being recent immigrants, relatively few college degrees held by those in the community, a low median family income, a counterculture of drugs and violence, low parental involvement in school-related activities, lower family support and greater economic strain for students in completion of homework, and generally poor educational performance tracing all the way from elementary through high school. However, East Palo Alto is also a unique situation when considering its location and high school specifics. East Palo Alto is a separate city from neighboring Palo Alto with different zip code, school board, and community government. Yet, it is separated by only railroad tracks and a highway from the Silicon Valley, home to Stanford University, the most concentrated technology sector of the country, and one of the most prosperous areas of the country as well. It is therefore somewhat puzzling to consider the stark contrast between these demographics and this economy and those of East Palo Alto. The closing of the high school in East Palo Alto in the

2 1970s further complicated the situation of EPA youth by requiring them to attend four high schools scattered throughout the surrounding districts ranging anywhere from a 30 to 90 minute bus ride away, and located in areas which are very similar in wealth and demographics to Palo Alto, if not in Palo Alto itself. The result of these two factors has been a sharp decline in performance upon reaching high school for those students which had reached high academic performance in previous grades and a system which is absolutely foreign to and therefore unable to meet the needs of these incoming EPA students. While this situation is the result of many factors, I am most interested for the course of this paper in how poverty among EPA households affects students graduation rates. Many studies, both from the sociological and economic fields, identify poverty as a strong predictor of high school drop-out rates. In a literature review conducted by E. Gregory Woods, he refers to J. A. Asche (1989) who states that: Based on a thorough analysis of the research literature, Wells and Bechard (1989) identified four major categories of factors that contribute to a student profile of characteristics that may lead to a student's dropping out of school. The four categories list risk factors that are school-related, student-related, community-related, and familyrelated. The likelihood of a student dropping out of school increases as the combination of risk factors becomes more multifaceted.1 After explaining how these four categories correlate with drop-out rates, Woods clarifies the place of poverty among them, not as the most significant of all, but as the most significant among all the community-related factors. Lest these correlations be misunderstood, it is also important to point out that, of the community-related factors, it is poverty that is the strongest predictor of dropping out. When socioeconomic factors are controlled, the differences across racial, ethnic, geographic, and other demographic lines blur (OERI Urban Superintendents Network 1987, p. 5). Researchers have also found that working can contribute to a student dropping out. Some research shows that student employment begins to correlate with dropping out when the student regularly works over 14 hours per week.2 From a study conducted by Civic Enterprises, LLC, 32 percent of high school drop-outs interviewed left to get a job and make money.3 A report prepared for the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) in July 2007 finds additional support that income restraints, related work demands, family responsibilities, and high educational costs facing the working poor all combine to prevent many eligible working poor from entering postsecondary educational
1 2

See (Woods 1995), p. 2-3. Ibid., p. 3. 3 (Bridgeland and Morrison 2006), p. 6.

3 programs.4 In November 2008, the IHEP released another report entitled Promise Lost: College-Qualified Students Who Dont Enroll in College, which found a similar relationship between poverty and lack of postsecondary continuation through results from two national surveys of both college-qualified high school graduates and high school counselors. From one interview at a private, rural, K-12 school, a guidance counselor explained why some collegequalified students do not enroll in college. There is a very subtle notion, she said, that education is nice but not necessary; so, if you dont know what you want to do, dont waste your money.5 These studies establish that the working poor face constraints which force their allocation of time and energy away from schooling, viewed as investment with long-term, higher future returns, toward working, or immediate income generation. To compound this problem, the working poor often overestimate the expected costs of postsecondary education, thereby increasing the perceived size down-payment of their education and causing future earnings to become even more nebulous and even less demanding than the demands of present living.6 Beyond introducing out-of-school constraints, poverty also constrains students in-school behavior. Often, educators in poorer areas come from significantly different socioeconomic backgrounds than their students, creating a disconnect within the classroom that inhibits teachers from knowing and meeting the needs of students coming from a culture of poverty. Dr. Ruby K. Payne in her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, details how her experience with students from poverty has revealed that low-income families prepare students to find the best yard sales and move apartments in short amounts of time, but fail to prepare them for activities necessary for school success such as how to prepare for college and study skills.7 Teachers who fail to understand this preparation gap will likely also fail to adapt teaching styles to accommodate.

II. ECONOMETRIC BACKGROUND


This paper analyzes this relationship between graduation rates and poverty through the consideration of several variables used as indicators of poverty. These variables express both the socioeconomic status of the individual students and of their households and community. I constructed a model to allow me to look at the effect of poverty on graduation rates from several angles. First, I considered the percent of enrolled high school students that were of minority ethnicity. This serves as a type of control to remove the effect of minority ethnicity from that of poverty on graduation rates. Many studies have shown that areas with higher percentages of minority residences empirically tend to have lower graduation rates. Most intuitively, this is because these ethnic minority groups are in many areas composed of immigrants with low levels of education and limited experience as to how to help their children succeed in the U.S.

4 5

(McSwain and Davis 2007) (Hahn and Price, Ph.D. 2008, 13) 6 (Cunningham, Erisman, Ph.D. and Looney 2007, 20) 7 (Ruby K. Payne 2005)

4 education system.8 By including this variable, I am able to discern the effect of poverty on graduation rates without the interference of minority/immigration issues. Second, I include four variables that explore the channels through which poverty may be affecting drop-out rates. To investigate whether poverty may be creating a poverty gap where poor communities lack the resources to enable students to exit cycles of low educational achievement, I consider the educational trends in the society, represented by a measurement of the percent of the population with an Associates Degree (AD). In an area where many students do not attend 4-year universities, but instead seek 2-year degrees which are most often obtained through vocational schools, technical schools, or community colleges, there will be little precedent for students to go on to obtain a Bachelors Degree, including lack of role models, lack of tutors, and lack of networks. While a measure of the percent of the population that hold Bachelors Degrees would measure many of the same trends, it would also be endogenous with graduation rates, and so only a measure for Associates Degrees is used. To consider whether poverty may be affecting drop-out rates via unemployment trends, I include a measure of the unemployment rate. The working poor face higher financial constraints than middle-income families due to higher percentage of single-parents, low per capita personal income, and easiness of being replaced in the work force. These constraints create a constant incentive that lends higher utility to allocation of time in working rather than education for children in these households. When unemployment rates are high, introducing the added constraint of difficulty in finding work and perhaps the reduction of family members individual incomes or number of family members working during an unexpected rise in those rates, the incentive to drop out of high school and work part or full time is even greater for students. And to consider the more permanent levels of poverty in a state, I include a measure for the percent of population under 65 at or below the poverty level. These levels tend not to fluctuate as much as unemployment rates might and are also strongly correlated with per capita personal income and median family income and so are a reasonably telling indicator of the long-term poverty levels of an area. When poverty is a deep-seated circumstance, students and their families make choices assuming it will continue which is reflected in decisions about education and preparation for future job opportunities. Additionally, these areas have lower tax revenues, reducing the ability for state or local governments to expand or build schools or to invest in improvement of faculty or curriculum. The fourth variable I include is a measure of the percent of the population employed in the manufacturing or extraction sectors. This measure indicates the job opportunities available to high school graduates. In areas where this measure is high, the return to a high school diploma for a graduate remaining in the area is much lower than when this measure is low, indicating many job opportunities for those with a high school degree and, when this measure is very low, to those with a bachelors degree. In East Palo Alto, this trend is seen sharply, as in East Palo Alto the manufacturing sector employed more employees per 100,000 than any other major economic sector in the year 1997, while in Palo Alto manufacturing has been dwarfed by
8

(Alba and Silberman 2009).

5 the growth of the professional, scientific, and technical services sector with next to none of this growth spilling over the highway which divides the two communities. 9 This is reflected very succinctly in the differences in graduation rates between the two areas. Lastly, I included a measure for the percent of population that are youth ages 0 to 19 in order to control for the fact that if a state/community is generally poorer, but has a high fraction of the population that are youth, resources will be shifted to focus more heavily on meeting the needs of that large youth population group, thus increasing graduation rates even while poverty levels may be high. Of all these variables the coefficients of interest will be those related to the four poverty indicators as mentioned above, namely percent of population with Associates Degrees, unemployment rates, percent of population living under the poverty level, and percent of population employed in the manufacturing and extraction sectors. I expect all these to be negatively related to the high school graduation rates.

III. DATA
Data was adapted from the Economic Needs Index (ENI), a regional-level study conducted by the Lumina Foundation for Education evaluating educational, economic, and population factors that affect educational policy. These indicators were compiled from data provided by the US Census Bureau collected in 2,071 Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs).10 This project uses a portion of that data set with comprising economic indicators for all 50 US states in the year 2005. To confirm the theoretical assumptions laid out in Section II, I begin with all the variables included in the ENI data package, then prove the validity of the previously stated model. Table 1 shows a description of the variables in that original data set. Of these variables, Perc_GradNCES is the dependent variable of interest with Perc_Youth, Perc_Mid, and AtRisk_Min representing population independent variables, Perc_Min, HS18_64, AD25_64, BDup 25_64, and Diff_Coll representing education independent variables, and UnemRt, Pov_under65, MFI, PCPInc, and Man_Ext representing economic independent variables. I considered each of these variables to construct my model so as to most lend to the testing of my original hypothesis that an increase in poverty levels decreases high school graduation rates. I found that many of these variables were either irrelevant to that question of interest or correlated among each other causing multicollinearity. In considering the degree-related variables, both HS18_64 and AD25_64 were not correlated with strong fluctuations in PCPInc, while BDup25_64 was a strong predictor. In order to avoid multicollinearity, BDup25_64 was dropped from the model. Among the economic variables, Pov_under65 was correlated with MFI and PCPInc and so was used to represent both. While the population indicators would be useful if composited and used to measure how population growth
9 10

(City-Data.com n.d.) (Educational Needs Index 2009)

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Table 1: Desciption of Variables

Variable

Variable Description

Perc_GradNCES Public High School Graduation Rate - % 9th Graders Graduating 4 Years Later - (NCES) Perc_Min HS18_64 AD25_64 BDup25_64 Diff_Coll UnemRt Pov_under65 MFI PCPInc Man_Ext Perc_Youth Perc_Mid AtRisk_Min % minority enrolled in Public High School Percent of 18 to 64 Year Olds With a High School Diploma (2005) Percent of 25 to 64 Year Olds With an Associates Degree (2005) Percent of 25 to 64 Year Olds With a Bachelor's Degree or Higher (2005) % Difference in College Attainment Between Young (25 to 35) and Older (45 to 54) Unemployment Rate (2005) Percent of Population Under 65 At or Below the Poverty Level (2005) Median Family Income (2005) Per Capita Personal Income (2005) Percent of Employment in Manufacturing and Extraction Industries (2005) Percent of Population Ages 0 to 19 (2005) Percent of Population Ages 20 to 44 (2005) Percent At-Risk Minorities 0 to 44 (2005)

and shifting demographics affected education, I chose not to include them as they were found insignificant. Finally, AtRisk_Min and Perc_Min were highly correlated, stemming from the fact that schools represent the demographics within which they are located. Removing all these, the final model is constructed as the simple linear model, (1) !"#$ !"#$%&'( = !! + !! !"#$ !"# + !! !"25 64 + !! !"#$%& + !! !"# !"#$%65 + !! !"# !"# + !! !"#$ !"#$

7 To further support this construction, I included all the degree and population variables and ran a regression then analyzed the models correlation matrix. This unrestricted model is, (2) !"#$ !"#$%&'( = !! + !! !"#$ !"# + !! !"18 64 + !! !"25 64 + !! !"#$25 64 + !! !"## !"## + !! !"#$%! + !! !"# !"#$%65 + !! !"# + !!" !"!#$% + !!! !"# !"# + !!" !"#$ !"#$ + !!" !"#$ !"# + !!" !"#$%&_!"#

The summary statistics for this model are shown in Table 2 and Table 3 shows its correlation matrix.

Table 2: Summary statistics for equation (2)

9 As expected, MFI, PCPInc, HS18_64, BDup25_64, Diff_Coll, Perc_Mid, and AtRisk_Min were all statistically insignificant in this model at the 10% level. The correlation matrix also confirmed my hypotheses about multicollinearity as mentioned above. For these reasons, the final model used in my analysis was equation (1). The basic statistical descriptions of the variables included in this equation are given in Table 4, with estimation results from OLS regression in Table 5. By OLS regression, the most significant of the four poverty indicators included is the coefficient for unemployment rate, significant even at the 5% level. While significant t-statistics are not the only important indicators of causality, they do lend great support for conclusions. In this case, the data would show that with a 1% increase in unemployment rate, the graduation rate of an area would fall by 2.7%. While the confidence level of this statistic is almost as large as the coefficient itself, the entirety of that range is negative, signifying that while unemployment rate does fluctuate sharply, its effect is always detrimental on graduation rates.
Table 4: Statistical descriptions of variables

Variable Perc_GradNCES Perc_Min AD25_64 UnemRt Pov_under65 Man_Ext Perc_Youth

Obs 50 50 50 50 50 50 50

Mean 71.714 33.44 8.5546 6.4496 13.8578 11.821 27.2844

Std. Dev. 9.14944 18.02171 1.526655 1.249798 3.433413 3.855355 2.015329

Min 50.7 4 5.15 3.43 7.81 3.64 23.31

Max 91.3 80 13.24 9.22 22.56 20.42 33.5

Table 5: Estimation results

10 Assumption 1: Normality of the Error Terms To test for the normal distribution of the error terms, I performed a Jarque-Bera test which expresses both the skewness and the kurtosis of the distribution of the error terms. The result is asymptotically distributed as a Chi square distribution with two degrees of freedom and indicates how close the skewness and kurtosis of the error terms of the model tested are to a model with normally distributed error terms. In this test, the null hypothesis is that the errors are normally distributed. After performing the test, the Chi square statistic was 4.90 with a probability greater than this of 0.086. At the 10% level, I would reject the null hypothesis, signifying that the errors are not normally distributed, while at the 5% level I would fail to reject this hypothesis, implying, rather, that they are normally distributed. To correct for the possibility of non-normally distributed error terms, I implied a Laplace distribution to the model and received the results reported in Table 6. These results follow the same trends as the original model, though cause t-statistics to change so that the most significant coefficient is that of UnemRt. This further establishes that this is a powerful determinant of high school drop-out rates. Its effect is also magnified, resulting in a 3% drop in graduation rates for every 1% increase in unemployment rates.
Table 6: Model Corrected for Non-Normally Distributed Error Terms

Assumption 3: Heteroskedasticity To test for heteroskedasticity, I performed two tests: the Goldfield-Quandt test and the Breusch-Pagan Test. For the Goldfield-Quandt test, I applied several methods of dividing the data into runs of thirds. First, I divided based on trends in Perc_Min, and compared the variances of the first and third runs by an F-statistic with 13 and 10 degrees of freedom. The

11 resultant F-statistic was 4.46 with a p-value of 2.91. Since this is largely different from 1, as it should be in the case of homoscedasticity where variances are constant across all runs, I reject the null hypothesis of homoskedasticity. I performed the test using differently constructed runs, dividing based on trends in Perc_Youth, Pov_under65, and UnemRt, though all behaved similar to the first test, even after increasing the sample sizes of the first and third runs in each set to increase observations and accuracy in the test. The Breusch-Pagan test regresses the squares of the estimated errors on the independent variables and tests for their explanatory power using LM or F tests. Using all varieties of this test returned a probability greater than the Chi square statistic of approximately 2.5. At this level, we again reject the hypothesis of homoskedasticity. Without correcting for this heteroskedasticity, the estimators will still be unbiased and consistent, but will not be the minimum variance estimator for the model. To find a better estimator, I use a variance-weighted least squares regression, based on the method described by Wooldridge to generate the variance component by generating estimated or feasible generalized least squares estimators (BLUE) with multiple regressors. By regressing the natural logarithm of the squared OLS residuals on the dependent variables and using the resultant variance to weight the data based on its variance, the result was a model with near homoskedasticity. Table 7 shows the results of this regression.
Table 7: Variance-weighted least squares estimation results

In this model, the t-statistics for UnemRt, Man_Ext, and Perc_Youth improve to be significant at the 5% level, with the coefficient for Man_Ext still hovering around zero, Perc_Youth still positive, and UnemRt with a coefficient more influential than the original model.

IV. ANALYSIS
Considering all the above tests and results, the data supports only some of the original hypotheses, while proving others false. In every regression, the coefficient for unemployment rate was statistically significant and negative. In the original model, this coefficient was -2.7. The magnitude of this effect increased to about -3.0 when the model was corrected for nonnormally distributed error terms and heteroskedasticity. This supports the original hypothesis

12 that unemployment introduces added constraints on students and their families which often lead them out of school and into the work force before completing high school. Of the four poverty indicators, this was the most significant. AD25_64 and Man_Ext were both highly insignificant which could be the result of multicollinearity caused by the propensity of manufacturing or extraction industries to require only AD-level training. The confidence intervals of these coefficients center closely around zero, making them ineffective in forecasting and determining causality. Another reason Man_Ext may be unrelated to graduation rates could be that in an age of increased mobility among states and regions, the employment opportunities of a specific area may not affect its inhabitants own employment options as strongly as expected. This same increased mobility and its digital counterpart, increased access to inter-regional communication technology, may also explain the insignificance of the coefficient for AD25_64. Summarily though, both these variables seem to have little impact on graduation rates overall. Similarly, though less extreme, Pov_under65 has a confidence interval and t-statistic that places its coefficient just beyond statistical significance. This could be due to an effect caused by societies where poor families see education as the most plausible means of escaping poverty and so devote a greater amount of attention and resources toward their childrens successful education. Or, this could be an issue of simultaneity bias wherein areas with greater focus on education may be poorer as families choose to keep their children in school despite lower short-term family income levels. Though unrelated to the question of interest, the results about Perc_Youth and Perc_Min are telling in the drop-out rate story. Both behaved as expected and with significance, Perc_Youth at the 10% level and Perc_Min at the 5% level. A 1% increase in Perc_Youth predicts an equal percent increase in high school graduation rates. This supports the expectation as stated in Section II. The most significant of any variable was Perc_Min, though it predicted less than 1% of the movement in graduation rates. These results show that while poverty is related to high school drop-out rates, the channel through which this effect acts is likely through unemployment rates rather than through poverty levels, educational precedence, or employment opportunity. This relationship may be explained by the fact that in times of unexpected shocks in short-term unemployment rates, parents feel the need to encourage their children to work at least part-time without feeling they are harming their education. In the short-run, this is seen as a couching mechanism to absorb the short-term shock. Like the shock, the employment demands on the children are also expected to be short-term. However, even short-term shifts in students employment hours can lead to lowered grades in school which decrease the chances of graduating. As cited in Section I, students school performance has been found to be negatively correlated with hours worked in part-time employment. This gives added proof of the need for economic incentives to enable parents to keep their children in school, especially in times of short-term economic downturns. This could come in the form of introducing credit or loan stipulations which reward those families whose children go to school without working more than 14 hours in part-time employment.

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V. SUMMARY & CONCLUSIONS


The original question of interest in this paper was how poverty affects high school dropout rates. Through OLS estimation and several statistical tests, this question was answered differently than expected, but still with an economically significant answer. Of four indicators of poverty, including unemployment rates, population poverty levels, precedence of educational achievement, and employment opportunities, unemployment rates was found to be the strongest predictor of high school graduation rates in the year 2005 in the United States. The percent minority in a school and the percent of youth in a population were also related to that areas graduation rates. The significance of the coefficients for Perc_Min and Perc_Youth seen in many of the estimations lend to future work. There is much existing research documenting how the percentage of minority students in a school is strongly correlated with its educational success. This study supports that body of research. However, there is opportunity to research why or how the percent of youth that make up a population influences high school graduation rates in that area to determine whether data supports the hypothesis that this relates to allocation of resources among that population. This study was limited by the use of only one year of data. To improve the significance and forecasting ability of the results, more data could be considered which data explains trends in all the variables over the course of a number of years, perhaps from 1997 to 2005, rather than 2005 only. This limitation manifests itself especially in unemployment rates, but also in all the variables in two ways: first, that 2005 graduation rates are the result of four years of drop-out occurrences affected by four or more years of trends; and second, using only one years worth of data removes the ability to analyze elasticities and lagged effects. Another improvement could be made by introducing interaction terms to observe the added effect of, for example, being both unemployed and a minority student, or being both a minority student and below the poverty level. Lastly, the results would be more applicable if the data were not derived from the statelevel aggregation of the PUMA data sets, but rather left as micro-level data so as to yield more observations for greater statistical accuracy. In East Palo Alto, where Perc_Min, UnemRt (and certainly in the last two years), and Pov_under65 would all be high, the drop-out rates are reportedly 60-75% in the four high schools EPA students regularly attend. Although, my internship which introduced me to the area and its unique challenges will end with this semester, I hope to apply the lessons learned and the results found from this econometric study to the effort of reducing these rates and improving students ability to do their part in attaining a postsecondary education.

APPENDICES

14 1. Bibliography Alba, Richard, and Roxanne Silberman. "The Children of Immigrants and Host-Society Educational Systems: Mexicans in the United States and North Africans in France." Teachers College Record, 2009: 1444-1475. Bridgeland, John M., and Karen Burke Morrison. The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts. Civic Enterprises, LLC., 2006. City-Data.com. Palo Alto, California (CA): accommodation, waste management, arts, entertainment & recreation, etc. n.d. http://www.city-data.com/business/econ-Palo-AltoCalifornia.html (accessed April 12, 2010). Cunningham, Alisa F., Wendy Erisman, Ph.D., and Shannon M. Looney. From Aspirations to Action: The Role of Middle School Parents in Making the Dream of College a Reality. Institute for Higher Education Policy, 2007. Educational Needs Index. Educational Needs Index. 2009. http://www.educationalneedsindex.com/ (accessed March 2010). Hahn, Ryan D., and Derek Price, Ph.D. Promise Lost: College-Qualified Students Who Don't Enroll in College. Institute for Higher Education Policy, 2008. McSwain, Courtney, and Ryan Davis. College Access for the Working Poor: Overcoming Burdens to Succeed in Higher Education. Institute for Higher Education Policy, 2007. Ruby K. Payne, Ph.D. A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Highlands, TX: aha!Process, Inc, 2005. Woods, E. Gregory. Reducing the Dropout Rate. NorthWest Regional Education Laboratory, 1995.

2. Explanation of Fundamental Documentation and Resources Tierney, William G., and Jun, Alexander. A University Helps Prepare Low Income Youths for College: Tracking School Success. The Journal of Higher Education. Vol. 72, No. 2, Special Issue: The Social Role of Higher Education (Mar. Apr., 2001), pp. 205-225. Ohio State University Press.

15 A study of the impact of college preparation programs on drop-out rates for low-income urban minority youths. Evidence is shown that institutions which show responsibility to the larger society and programs that work to strengthen traditional culture referred to as cultural integrity increase student success. McSwain, Courtney and Davis, Ryan. College Access for the Working Poor: Overcoming Burdens to Succeed in Higher Education. Institute for Higher Education Policy. July 2007. This report, prepared for the Institute for Higher Educational Policy considers how the working poor are constrained in terms of educational choices. Income constraints, related work demands, family responsibilities, and high educational costs all combine to prevent many eligible working poor from entering postsecondary educational programs. Bridgeland, John M., DiIulio, Jr., John J., and Morison, Karen Burke. The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts. Civic Enterprises, LLC. March 2006. A report by Civic Enterprises in association with peter D. Hart Research Associates for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The purpose of this study is to determine who is dropping out of high school, for what reasons, their perspectives and feelings, and possible ways to help students stay in school through policy and programs. In answer to why students drop out of high school, this study reports that 32 percent of high school drop-outs left to get a job and make money, one-third of those surveyed. Erisman, Wendy, and Looney, Shannon. Opening the Door to the American Dream: Increasing Higher Education Access and Success for Immigrants. Institute for Higher Education Policy. A study conducted for the Institute for Higher Education Policy that shows how legal immigrant status is correlated with more barriers to higher education, including financial barriers and limited academic history for themselves or their family.

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