Taking the Easy Way Out: How the GED Testing Program Induces Students to Drop Out

James J. Heckman, Paul Anthony LaFontaine () and Pedro L. Rodríguez ()
Additional contact information
Pedro L. Rodríguez: Harris School, University of Chicago

No 3495, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: We exploit an exogenous increase in General Educational Development (GED) testing requirements to determine whether raising the difficulty of the test causes students to finish high school rather than drop out and GED certify. We find that a six point decrease in GED pass rates induces a 1.3 point decline in overall dropout rates. The effect size is also much larger for older students and minorities. Finally, a natural experiment based on the late introduction of the GED in California reveals, that adopting the program increased the dropout rate by 3 points more relative to other states during the mid-1970s.

Keywords: GED; dropout (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
Date: Written 2008-05
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.iza.org/dp3495.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Taking the Easy Way Out: How the GED Testing Program Induces Students to Drop Out (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().