Quote:
Originally Posted by Drolefille
While it is true to some extent that there's an anti-social aspect to dropping out today, I don't associate it with incompetence at all.
If it's only about the piece of paper and not about the job skills then it's become a problem. Similarly to how the college degrees have progressed from "You must have your BA" to "You must have your MA/PhD." Status, class, money, all this stuff is intertwined into a major supply/demand issue.
/tl;dr it's complicated and not just as simple as one or the other.
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I agree that the GED or diploma requirement might arbitrarily exclude people who can do the work, especially for older worker.
But since schools have had an enormous incentive with NCLB to get high school kids through (graduation rate is usually one of the secondary markers for high school AYP), kids who couldn't get through high school in the last five or so years may, for the same reasons they couldn't get though, be less desirable employees. If you can't make it to school because of your family obligations, you may be less likely to make it to work because of your family obligations, etc.
(Bizarrely, I'd say just as the public got the impression that academic requirements went up with NCLB, what really happened in terms of earning class credit is that the standards have probably gone way down. We have an online program in Georgia called Credit Recovery. If kids fail a class, they can complete it in CR sometimes in mere days or weeks.)