Should the General Education Diploma (GED) be eliminated?

A 2006 report by the EPE Research Center indicates
that the nationwide high school completion
rate for all students is 70 percent. More students are
lost in 9th grade than in any other grade (9th: 35%;
10th: 28%; 11th: 20%; 12th: 17%). Studies have found
differing rates of high school completion (through
a degree or GED) by youth in out-of-home care,
though the measures have been defined somewhat
differently. In a Washington state study, 59 percent
of youth in foster care enrolled in 11th grade completed
high school by the end of 12th grade. The
young adults in the Northwest Alumni Study and the
Casey National Alumni Study completed high school
(via diploma or GED) at rates of 85 percent and 86
percent, respectively, by age 25, which is comparable
to the general population rate. Both studies found,
however, much higher GED completion rates compared
to the general population (5 percent): over
one in four (29 percent) in the Northwest Study, and
nearly one in five (19 percent) in the Casey National
Study.

Mr. Heckman wanted to examine this idea more closely, so he analyzed a few large national databases of student performance. He found that in many important ways, the premise behind the GED was entirely valid. According to their scores on achievement tests, GED recipients were every bit as smart as high-school graduates. But when Mr. Heckman looked at their path through higher education, he found that GED recipients weren't anything like high-school graduates. At age 22, Mr. Heckman found, just 3% of GED recipients were either enrolled in a four-year university or had completed some kind of postsecondary degree, compared with 46% of high-school graduates. In fact, Heckman discovered that when you consider all kinds of important future outcomes—annual income, unemployment rate, divorce rate, use of illegal drugs—GED recipients look exactly like high-school dropouts, despite the fact that they have earned this supposedly valuable extra credential, and despite the fact that they are, on average, considerably more intelligent than high-school dropouts.

These results posed, for Mr. Heckman, a confounding intellectual puzzle. Like most economists, he had always believed that cognitive ability was the single most reliable determinant of how a person's life would turn out. Now he had discovered a group—GED holders—whose good test scores didn't seem to have any positive effect on their eventual outcomes. What was missing from the equation, Mr. Heckman concluded, were the psychological traits, or noncognitive skills, that had allowed the high-school graduates to make it through school.

on a slight tangent (perhaps) - Robert (Craven)'s talked about this a fair bit over the years.

http://www.differencebetween.net/science/difference-between-iq-and-eq/

Is EQ the same group of skills as the non-cognitive set of skills that are talked about in the studies about GED results?

I wonder if emotional intelligence can be taught. I suspect it can be developed, but what happens to people who are lacking in EQ to begin with?