Should the General Education Diploma (GED) be eliminated?

With a GED, the person is better equipped at facing life, getting a job and perhaps even then eyeing a college education or a trade school education (some form of advanced education).

Heckman is an empiricist. He also has a cause: He believes society invests in education too late for it to make much difference. "To solve later skill deficits, we need to invest in closing early skill deficits," says Heckman. "Waiting to address these issues makes the remedy much more costly—or impossible." Countless studies show that increased spending on early childhood education would affect both cognition and character at its most malleable, lowering dropout and juvenile delinquency rates by building "soft skills" such as discipline, self-esteem, motivation, collegiality and persistence.

Heckman's work shows that GED recipients do about as well as regular high school grads on academic tests. To that extent, the program works. But his analysis also demonstrates that those "soft skills" are what American education misses amid the growing obsession to reward cognitive learning. GED recipients who fail do so not because of their inability to do math but because of non-cognitive abilities.

I think this makes clear the danger when economists (and anyone other than educators) start dipping their toes into education policy.

Heckman, the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and one of the world’s leading figures in the study of human capital policy, has found that programs that encourage non-cognitive skills effectively promote long-term success for participants.

By allowing or inducing students to settle for the lesser credential rather than tough it out and earn 24 high school credits and a diploma, educators set up young people for lesser lives, according to James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago.

Heckman, in books and scholarly papers about the GED, decries the growth of GED programs because students who get them fare so poorly in life.

Heckman found that "obtaining a GED does not increase the wages of dropouts. ... The same traits that lead them to drop out of school also lead them to leave from jobs early, to divorce more frequently, and to fail in the military."

He worries that adults who should know better lure students down that path. "The GED creates problems," he wrote. "It induces students to drop out of school and lose the benefits of a high school (diploma)." Districts should make it much harder for students to forgo high school and pick the easier GED route, he argued.

Even people in jails and prisons can earn a GED, which might help in their rehabilitation and reduce the probability of their re-offending. It provides a stepping stone toward becoming a more productive and self supporting citizen.

An Empirical Test of the Heckman and Rubinstein GED Mixed-Signal: Evidence from Prison

Abstract

Economists have begun to embrace the notion, already accepted by the market, that GEDs and High School Diplomas signal similar cognitive abilities, but different non-cognitive abilities. To better understand this phenomenon and its implications, this paper presents a study of an education environment, prison, which provides natural controls for non-cognitive abilities. The study reveals similarities in decisions between the two types of agents that are surprising in light of decisions made in standard educational environments. The results support the mixed-signal theory and furthermore suggest that stricter enforcement of discipline and other non-cognitive attributes may help to reduce dropout rates in non-prison educational facilities.

What do you think?

I can agree with his cause but that doesn't change his argument that the GED should be eliminated.

I'm not entirely convinced that it is some kind of character flaw that leads kids to drop out of school

On this view, the merits of abolishing the GED would depend on what students would do instead. Would they drop out, or would they finish high school?

Furthermore, although the GED program may be beneficial to some dropouts, it may have unintended consequences. Several studies, for example, find that the GED program may induce some students to drop out.7

Non-traditional pathways may also be appealing from the school’s perspective.
Teachers and school administrators typically face strong external
pressure to raise pass rates on HSEEs (and other state-mandated tests). In
the era of No Child Left Behind, salaries, job security, and even local control
of schools can depend, in part, on the results. As others have suggested, the
nature of this incentive structure may prompt some schools to “push out”
low-performing students whose scores are unlikely to exceed the required
threshold (Heilig and Darling-Hammond 2008), thereby removing them from
the denominator of the exam-passing rate.3 In some cases, these difficult-toeducate
students may be channeled toward alternative testing programs like
the GED—a practice that often enables schools to count them as“transfers”
rather high school dropouts