More is better: That is the conventional wisdom when it comes to graduating from high school. The more students get pushed across the finish line, the better for everyone. Policy has followed that principle — and it has worked. Across the United States, about 87% of students who started high school in 2021 graduated four years later—a significant bump from 2012, when the figure was 80%. Cue copious self-congratulation from governors and educators.
But is this really cause for celebration? The late, great investor Charlie Munger used to say, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” In effect, the U.S. has incentivized boosting graduation rates — and that has been the outcome. The more important question is whether students are ready to be informed citizens and productive workers.
The answer here is probably not. The most recent Program for International Student Assessment found that U.S. student performance has dropped sharply for reading while more 15-year-olds are falling short of basic proficiency in math, too.
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
If boosting graduation is the goal, one way to get there is to lower standards. Take “credit-recovery” programs, which offer a way for students who are failing a course to catch up without having to repeat a whole semester. If done well, these programs make sense. Too often, however, absentee students “recover” by taking a low-effort, high-pass online program. In effect, all they learn is that adults will let them off the hook, so they can stay on track to graduate.
Whether they have a diploma or not, young people who cannot understand written directions or perform basic math are entering the workforce without the skills they will need. The same is true of soft skills. Showing up consistently, meeting deadlines and accepting responsibility for failure: These are requirements of adulthood. And there are no credit recovery programs for those who lack them.
That is why concentrating so much effort on just raising graduation rates is misguided if students are getting a diploma that lacks content. In New York, for example, the graduation rate has dipped two points since 2022. That is part of the reason the state recently announced it would ditch the requirement for students to pass Regents exams; officials argued that these pose a barrier to graduation for low-income and vulnerable students. Fewer than half of New York’s eighth-graders perform at grade level in reading and science; it’s not surprising that taking Regents exams a few years later is daunting.
Shielding students from high standards is not compassionate; it simply delays the consequences. It also signals to students that you don’t have to do the work to still graduate. That message is particularly dangerous: Why try if it isn’t going to matter? The result: more students unprepared for what comes next.
No one in public life wants to be the one to explain why fewer students graduated. At the very least, though, they should care as much about where the line is as how many manage to cross it. Poor performance should not be hidden or excused but brought to light and seen as a call to urgent action. Artificially boosted graduation rates obscure that message and take pressure off systems to improve.
None of this means schools should simply accept student failure. If students are chronically absent, get them back into the classroom. If a ninth grader is failing algebra, the response should be to teach algebra, not to find the fastest mechanism for converting an F into a credit. And if the F is well and truly earned, so be it.
If a high school diploma is to mean anything, it must differentiate between those who mastered the skills to earn that diploma and those who have not. Otherwise, the value of the diploma to students and future employers — who still view graduating high school as a basic signal of ability and soft skills — is degraded.
We can and should continue to debate how our education system can best prepare students for today’s economy. Rewarding high schools for becoming diploma mills is not the way to meet this challenge.