Need a good reason to stay in school?  The taxpayers!  USA Today has recently released a report that college dropouts are costing taxpayers billions each year.

The report came from the American Institutes For Research: Finishing The First Lap – The Cost of First-Year Student Attrition in America’s Four-Year Colleges and Universities. According to their research only 60 percent of students graduate from a four-year college within six years. They also found that more than $9 billion was spent by state and federal governments to support students who left school before their sophomore year within a five-year span of time.

In addition to the $9 billion the government has spent, the report also found that 30 percent of first-year students who failed to return to campus for year two accounted for $6.2 billion in state appropriations for colleges and universities and more than $1.4 billion in student grants from state governments.

The study did not include data from community colleges, where dropout rates are higher than four-year colleges and universities. Thirteen states reported losing $200 million in funds to students dropping out before their second year of college.

The goal of this study is to find a way to improve outcomes and performance among higher education institutions. Finishing the First Lap has launched a new interactive website, CollegeMeasures.org which allows users to evaluate the performance of colleges on a variety of measures. According to their site, they focus on seven key outcomes measures. These include: graduation rates, first-year retention rates, education-related cost per student, cost per degree, student loan default rates, and the ratio of student loan payments to earnings for recent graduates. In addition, we have created a measure for “cost of attrition” which quantifies the amount of money a college spends to educate first-year undergraduate students (first-time, full-time) who do not begin a second year. Further detailed data is provided for each of the seven measures.

While many people ponder why our colleges and universities are experiencing such high attrition rates, it may be beneficial to remember that high schools are under the gun to churn out more graduates who attend college. Schools with only 30% of students applying to and attending college are working hard to get more students to college.  Students who barely graduate from high school are pushed to apply and attend college to help high schools look better.  The issue is that not all students are college material and many aren’t finding that out until they spend a year sitting in a university classroom.