A Partnership to Improve the Lives of Adults Without a High School Diploma
Tags: Learning, High School, Skills, Education, Technology

Brandi left high school to become a parent during her junior year. While she was raising a family, 18 years passed.

“I lived in regret for a long time,” she said. “I always wanted to set an example for my kids and to get into college, but I didn’t know how.”

Through a friend, she learned about Graduation Alliance’s Ohio Adult High School Diploma Program, which serves students 22 and older in partnership with Brandi’s local community college. She signed up.

For 18 months, Brandi participated in online classes in math, science, English, art, and other subjects while she earned job-readiness certificates in financial literacy, digital literacy, and caregiving.

Those certificates and the skills she mastered helped her secure a job in health care as a caregiver before she even graduated. That job, in turn, is giving her experience that will help her as she pursues her next career goal.

“I’m going to become a social worker,” Brandi said. “Now I’m going to college, and I can start a career I really love.”

Life Without a Diploma

Unfortunately, success stories like Brandi’s are not nearly common enough. More than 31 million adults in the United States don’t have a high school diploma. And for them, accessing good jobs that offer living wages and support sustaining career pathways are becoming harder and harder to find.

Over the course of a lifetime, adults who don’t have a high school diploma will earn almost 70 percent less on average than people who do. Not having a high school diploma makes finding a good job harder. In 2017, less than 30 percent of available jobs were accessible to people with no high school credential. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2017 also found that the unemployment rate for workers without a high school education was 7.7 percent, compared with 5.3 percent for those with a high school education.

The impact of not having a high school diploma is not just felt by individuals. Statistics suggest that a lack of high school completion has a significant negative impact on communities as well. Americans without a diploma pay about half as much in federal and state income taxes every year as those who have graduated. It’s estimated that the loss of economic opportunities, fiscal costs from unrealized tax revenues, and additional public costs accrued from students who don’t complete totals $258,240 per person over a lifetime, with a $755,900 cost to society. The combined income and tax losses of a single cohort of 18-year-old dropouts over their lifetime is astonishing — likely about $192 billion, or 1.6 percent of GDP.

Assuming every year that 600,000 18-year-olds don’t complete high school, $36 billion isn’t put back into state ledgers that provide for publicly funded and subsidized health and well-being services.

The loss of opportunity and potential are also profound, cutting across families and generations. Children of adults who are high school dropouts are less likely to achieve postsecondary goals. Dropouts are more likely to rely on social programs such as welfare. People who do not finish high school are also at a higher risk of serious health problems, as well as at a substantially higher risk of living in poverty, not to mention challenges in accessing adequate transportation, child care, and health care.

Finding the Right Solution to Help Adults Complete High School

There are numerous models designed to help adults complete high school and earn a diploma. These include in-person classroom programs offered by school districts, community colleges, and nonprofits, as well as online courses and offerings that blend classroom and online instruction.

For the millions of adults without a diploma, traditional alternatives, like the GED, TASC, and HiSET high school equivalency exams, are missing the mark. One trend is clear — the number of people who obtained a diploma from an alternative program has dropped in every state around the nation. From 2012 to 2016, the annual number of people who completed one of the three high school equivalency exams fell more than 45 percent, from more than 570,000 in 2012 to roughly 310,000 in 2016. The number passing one of the exams and earning a diploma decreased more than 40 percent from almost 400,000 in 2012 to just over 225,000 in 2016.

As students seek better alternative programs, it can be difficult to assess the quality of emerging approaches to adult high school education. Too often, performance metrics and outcomes data vary from program to program, and are not reported clearly and consistently to stakeholders — especially students.

In addition to knowing whether or not a program actually works, cost is a critical consideration. We must also keep in mind who pays — generally the individual, the government, a corporation, or other institution. For individuals, committing to a potentially expensive program that may not work can put them at an even greater risk financially than when they started. Similarly, for government or other community-based investments, dollars must be maximized, leading some programs to select less effective but more affordable solutions without regard to the ultimate cost per outcome. Quality solutions and programs that are affordable are the key to effectively helping adult high school dropouts earn their diplomas.

For 35 years, JFF has studied and partnered with numerous education providers. We have found that high-impact instructional programs generally feature the following elements:

Diverse, intensive, and career-aligned curricula;

Student-determined pacing;

Focused and accessible advisory and mentorship support;

Tailored interventions and wraparound services to address non-academic barriers to learning;

Meeting students where they are, either in a blended, in-person, or online delivery model, that’s flexible and accessible for all learners;

Flexible payment options that balance completion with participation.

For 12 Years, Graduation Alliance Has Been Reaching the Hardest to Serve

Graduation Alliance entered the field of online high school completion programs in 2007 and has been helping adult students succeed ever since.

The Salt Lake City-based educational services company has developed an innovative model to support individuals who often have the most stacked against them: the long-term unemployed, low-income adults, previously incarcerated individuals, as well as students who tried other similar programs, but did not succeed.

The median age of Graduation Alliance’s adult student population is 29. Graduation Alliance students often cannot attend in-person programs because they lack reliable transportation, have inflexible work and family schedules, experience health problems, or other reasons. Graduation Alliance’s model provides both academic and social support in a flexible, fully online environment allowing them to reach their students wherever they are.

Central to the Graduation Alliance program is their pay-for-performance model. If an individual successfully progresses through critical milestones in the program, Graduation Alliance is compensated. If, on the other hand, students don’t meet milestones, for whatever reason, Graduation Alliance receives no return.

More than 250 school districts, local governments, nonprofits, workforce development boards, and community colleges have partnered with Graduation Alliance to recruit, reenroll, educate, and mentor underserved students. In 2018 alone, more than 1,800 students graduated with their high school diplomas.

Interest in Graduation Alliance’s diploma completion programs is strong — so strong that the organization doesn’t currently have enough financial support to fulfill demand. This has created waitlists, students opting for other less viable options or doing nothing, and a bottleneck in their journey to a better life.

For example, in Ohio and Michigan, when the state-funded programs’ enrollment period opened, demand was so high that enrollment was closed down just four months after launch. Today, more than 4,000 students sit on a waitlist that is still growing. Meanwhile, these programs continue to actively serve students. To date more than 1,300 students have successfully earned their high school diplomas from the Ohio and Michigan programs. Additionally, while the number of people who earn their diploma at alternative programs has been decreasing in every state, admission in Graduation Alliance’s Ohio and Michigan-based programs have sustained and maintained graduation rates of 50 percent and 67 percent respectively — on par with rates for traditional alternative programs.

With the Graduation Alliance pay-for-performance model, each million dollars of investment can be expected to yield the following outcomes:

200 new high school graduates

100 individuals with employability skills certificates

100 individuals with industry-recognized credentials

25 individuals with new, gainful employment

23 additional individuals with access to employer-sponsored health care

80 individuals enrolled in postsecondary education/training programs upon graduation

Online Learning, Wraparound Supports Increase Success

Graduation Alliance primarily delivers its programs online and offers robust supports to help nontraditional learners. There is an art to balancing the flexibility of the online environment with accountability for outcomes, and the Graduation Alliance model does this successfully by setting clear expectations for the pace at which participants should progress through the coursework and holding students accountable to these pacing requirements.

However, the organization recognizes that some participants may require more flexible schedules and may need some help with the curriculum. Graduation Alliance offers proactive academic supports, such as highly qualified teachers and academic coaches to work with students on pace and progress, and makes 24/7 tutoring services and dedicated math assistance available to students on demand.

Graduation Alliance offers career support services that play a vital role in preparing students for career pathways. Dedicated college and career planning services teams assist learners with postsecondary and employment transition planning throughout the program. Students have the opportunity to participate in career pathway programs, industry-recognized credential courses, and skills certificate programs to help them prepare for and pursue their next steps.