Dropping out

Dropping out means leaving a school, college, university or group for practical reasons, necessities, or disillusionment with the system from which the individual in question leaves.

In Canada, most individuals graduate grade 12 by the age of 18, according to Jason Gilmore who collects data of employment and education using the Labour Force Survey. The LFS is the official survey used to collect unemployment data in Canada (2010). Using this tool, assessing educational attainment and school attendance can calculate a dropout rate (Gilmore, 2010). It was found by the LFS that by 2009, 1 in 12 20-24-year-old adults did not have a high school diploma (Gilmore, 2010). It was also found by the study that men still have higher drop out rates than women, and that students outside of major cities and in the northern territories also have a higher risk of dropping out. Although since 1990, dropout rates have gone down from 20% to a low of 9% in 2010, it does not seem to be dropping since this time (2010).

The average Canadian dropout earns $70 less per week than their peers with a high school diploma. Graduates (without post-secondary) earned an average of $621 per week, whereas dropout students earned an average of $551 (Gilmore, 2010).

Even though dropout rates have gone down in the last 20–25 years, the concerns of the impact dropping out has on the labor market is very real (Gilmore, 2010). One in four students without a high school diploma who were in the labor market in 2009-2010 had less likelihood of finding a job due to economic, downturn (Gilmore, 2010).

In the United Kingdom, a dropout is anyone who leaves school, college or university without either completing their course of study or transferring to another educational institution. Dropout rate benchmarks are set for each higher education institution and monitored by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) and the Scottish Funding Council (SFC). Dropout rates are often one of the factors assessed when ranking UK universities in league tables.

In November 2014, a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that students from poorer home backgrounds were 8.4 percentage points more likely to drop out of university in the first two years of an undergraduate course than those from the richest homes; they were also 22.9 percentage points less likely to obtain a 2:1 or first degree. For students studying on the same course and who arrived at university with similar grades, the differences fell but remained significant. The report concluded that more should be done both to raise the attainment levels of poorer students prior to their arrival at university and to provide additional support to them at university.

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