Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

A new report by the U.S. Department of Education found that students who attended a Catholic high school were almost twice as likely as their public school peers to graduate college.

CNSNews.com is reporting on the study, conducted by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) which found that 61.9 percent of Catholic high schoolers earned a bachelor’s degree or higher within eight years of graduation compared to just 31.1 percent of students who attended a public high school.

Students who attended non-Catholic private high schoolers fared almost as well as Catholic high schoolers with 57.1 percent earning a bachelor’s degree or higher within eight years of graduation.

The report looked at the results of a representative sample of 13,133 Americans who were sophomores in high school in 2002.

The NCES survey also found that a student was much more likely to earn a college degree if he or she started college right after high school. Forty-nine percent of those who did so earned a degree. However, of those who delayed college by four to 12 months after graduation, only 21.2 percent completed a degree. Of those who waited 13 months or longer to start college, only 5.5 percent went on to earn a bachelor’s degree.

Over the past half century, the percentage of Americans aged 25-29 years who hold a bachelor’s degree or higher has almost tripled. In 1960, it was 11 percent. In 1970 it jumped to 16.4 percent and had climbed to 22.5 percent in 1990. A decade later, it was 29.1 percent. This latest report puts the figure at 33.3 percent.

Earning a degree made a big difference in the employment history of the students involved in the study. Of the 13,000 students surveyed, 11 percent were unemployed at the time of the study. Of those who did not finish high school, 25.9 percent were unemployed with 15 percent of high school graduates being without a job.

This is compared to only 5.2 percent of college grads who were unemployed at the conclusion of the study with 33 percent of those working earning a salary of $40,000 a year or more.  Less than seven percent of high school dropouts and only 13 percent of high school grads were earning that much at the time of the survey.

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