Faces of the GED: Understanding General Education Development Recipients’ Experiences Over the Life Course

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

For those who drop out of high school in the United States, the General Education Development (GED) certificate is the most common alternative secondary school credential. GED recipients make up a rapidly growing segment of the United States’ potential higher education and labor force populations with approximately 700,000 individuals sitting for the GED test each year and over 18 million earning GEDs since 1942. The GED is marketed as a “reliable and valuable pathway to a better life” for high school dropouts and is commonly referred to as the “high school equivalency” degree. However, research on GED recipients’ long-term outcomes does not provide support for these representations. To address problems of nonequivalence, GED proprietors have changed the test over time, making it more difficult to pass and better aligning its content with updates to secondary school curricula. But, in spite of the GED’s demonstrated improvements in rigor and psychometric equivalence, research has not shown the expected improvement in GED recipients’ outcomes. Given that research has substantiated the test’s rigor and psychometric equivalence, what might explain GED recipients’ poor outcomes?
While existing GED literature begins to examine explanations for GED recipients’ poor outcomes, most studies focus narrowly on pre-test individual characteristics as main explanatory factors. These variables typically provide weak guidelines for practice and little information about how policymakers might intervene with GED-takers to improve their outcomes. Thus, this study includes a range of factors from multiple ecological domains that may influence GED recipients’ experiences and eventual outcomes. Another commonality shared by current GED studies is that their analytic strategies all treat the GED population as a homogeneous group. My study explicitly models the GED population’s heterogeneity by focusing on GED recipients who go on to have positive long-term outcomes similar to those of high school graduates. Finally, none of the studies I reviewed included information about which version of the GED recipients took – the most recent 2002 iteration or a previous one. Given that test designers have better aligned the GED to contemporary high school curricula and increased its rigor over time, recipients who passed the 2002 version might have more favorable outcomes since they passed a more difficult test. With the GED getting ready to change again (i.e. the newest version will be fully implemented in 2014) this question is timely.
My study analyzes data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 with the sample restricted to GED recipients (N=983). First, using a causal comparative model, I explicitly model the GED population’s heterogeneity in regards to positive outcomes. Using outcomes from other seminal GED studies (e.g., annual income, health) I split GED recipients into two groups: (1) those with successful outcomes and (2) those with unsuccessful outcomes. This is done for each outcome examined using high school graduates’ data to operationalize “success” (e.g. GED recipients with an income at or above the sample’s high school graduates’ median income).

Author

• Lacey Ann Hartigan, University of Washington