Graduation Rates Quotes

The government sets targets for increased four-year high school graduation rates as part of its agenda for improving Americans' health.

The obsessive focus on a college degree has served neither taxpayers nor students well. Only 35 percent of students starting a four-year degree program will graduate within four years, and less than 60 percent will graduate within six years. Students who haven't graduated within six years probably never will.

When people talk about people being left behind - middle wages have not gone up for years, and we should recognize that, and there I think we need growth and skills - but there are these other people who have been left behind. When I say out loud, "Fifty percent of inner-city schoolkids do not graduate from high school," that is a national catastrophe. We should be ringing the alarm bells. It's not fair.

Americans should understand that 50%, or something like, of the kids in inner-city schools, often poor and often minority, don't graduate. And the ones that do don't necessarily have the skills to get a job. That is the biggest disgrace in this country.

I've been president of Brown and chancellor of Vanderbilt, where they have very high completion rates.

It's not how much you spend, it's how you spend it. We have been putting a lot of money into education in the state of Nevada, and it's gotten us to 50th in the country in graduation rates. We needed more accountability in our system.

High levels of homeownership have been shown to foster greater involvement in school and civic organizations, higher graduation rates, and greater neighborhood stability.

The arts significantly boost student achievement, reduce discipline problems, and increase the odds students will go on to graduate from college.

School desegregation is associated with higher graduation rates, greater employability, higher earnings, and decreased rates of incarceration.

Truancy rates are directly correlated to low graduation rates.

Asian countries produce eight times as many engineering bachelors as the United States, and the number of U.S. students graduating at the masters and PhD levels in these areas is declining.

To me, this goes beyond disappointing. It shows that we are failing to gain ground on the very conditions we need to reverse to improve our graduation rates and produce more students who are ready for college and the workforce.

When nearly a third of our high school students do not graduate on time with their peers, we have work to do. We must design our middle and high schools so that no student gets lost in the crowd and disconnected from his or her own potential.

We have too few college graduates. We also have too few people who are prepared for college.

I went to the graduation the other night of my first great grandchild - he's 21 or 22; and right at the graduation I looked, and 92 percent of those who graduated at the University of Illinois were females. Where can a Black female, who are now the lawyers, the engineers; they are the ones graduating with top degrees; where will they find in a Black male a counterpart that is equal to them? We are filling the jails, we are filling the prisons.

When I was at Tech, no public school was ahead of us in graduation rates. We got our guys to compete in the classroom, and if they're competing in class and in football, that's an attitude they take into life.

We have the highest graduation rates, the broadest health care access, and the greatest level of home ownership and workforce participation in the country. And we did it all with a small population in a cold state that coastal big shots refer to as fly-over land.