5 ms·

Survey Reveals Why High School Students Drop Out

45 points by robg 16y ago

ohashi 16y ago
It's interesting to see the reasoning and the regret (most people wish they had finished). However, I wonder what sort of bias is introduced looking backward. Are these the real underlying reasons for dropping out or just surface excuses retrospectively used?
bane 16y ago
One of the major problems in the U.S. is the one-size-fits-all mentality. Thousands of kids are sent to enormous mega-schools and are expected to be stamped through a unified educational process like a piece of mass production. The result is that the public school system becomes more like a holding pen than an educational opportunity. While the U.S. does do a pretty good job of identifying gifted students and herding them off to more specialized education, it does a very poor job of identifying students for more vocational training. In many systems, students are segregated early...perhaps middle school...and receive very different educations depending on their chances of going to college and getting a degree or vocational school and learning a trade. (of course I say this now with a handful of degrees under my belt when I would have been an obvious High Schooler for the vocational education...so it's not a perfect idea by any stretch)
- coffeedrinker 16y ago
  This. And what goes along with it: Not pushing everyone to the same end. For example, learning math has many valuable aspects. However, learning advanced math is not valuable for everyone. In fact, it becomes detrimental to the student who struggles with it. Rather than find the subjects that are interesting and worthwhile, students are in situations where they perform poorly and will never benefit from it. The school system (from the state on down) thinks that requiring more is the solution but they should focus on doing less and doing it very well. Rather than adding more advanced classes to students who already are not benefiting from them, a solid basic foundation should be given and then move the kids into trades and vocations that suit their interests and abilities.
  - ry0ohki 16y ago
    I remember I'd always question my high school math teachers "why do I need this? What will I use this for in real life?". They never had great answers (although in my old age I can now think of good reasons), but providing real life useful context around what is taught I think would help a lot of kids understand the importance.
    - WalterBright 16y ago
      I always give an answer given to me by a used car salesman. Those who don't understand math can and will get rooked for $$$$ by those who sell them financing.
      - klbarry 16y ago
        True, but that is more along the lines of quantitative thinking. All the specific math actually useful to most people (compound interes, depreciation, etc) could be taught in a one semester course.
        bugsy 16y ago
        Yes, the discussions on math regarding high school always seem strange to me. There is a lot of talk about the relevance of calculus and trigonometry (which I personally think are relevant and should be understood, trigonometry is required for woodworking and crafts for example), but the reality is that regardless of whatever classes they have supposedly passed the typical high school graduate has just basic arithmetic skills and many have a competency level below that, requiring a calculator in order to make change from a dollar. They have third grade level skills and nothing more. But the reality is that basic arithmetic skills are taught well and rapidly throughout the rest of the industrialized world. There are various reasons for it and the parents are not to blame, nor are "higher standards" and homework the answer. For kids that are 17 and can't reduce a fraction the answer is not to require them to take calculus next. Alas, by the time one is 14 it is too late to be learning the basics. There is no excuse to be spending so many hours in school and have students that are passed on year after year without knowing basic math and reading skills, and the usual big talk from politicians about high standards won't fix what is wrong.
awakeasleep 16y ago
Found a few aspects of this article frustrating. First, the linked "study" isn't a study at all, it's a summary written for public consumption. Second, we get no information about how the figures were derived- were these people presented with a multiple choice survey? What choices were available on that survey? Third, the whole study is built on people's self-reported analysis of their own motivations. While valuable, I know that kind of data isn't fully reliable.
bugsy 16y ago
I don't know why Gates is advocating for fewer drop outs. Drop outs are one of the few things that is working for kids. Schools segregate on age now not ability. For smart kids, school is frustrating and holds them back. It is better for them to leave school at 15 and transfer to a community college where they can take control of their education. For not-smart kids, vocational education from 15-17 leading to apprenticeships gives them something of interest and useful to them. For average kids, the system might work if the other two groups who are frustrated were channelled towards more useful pursuits than sitting bored, and sometimes forced to take amphetamines like Ritalin just to have the appearance of being focused.
- pohl 16y ago
  I think the way you've partitioned the universal set of kids into "smart" and "not smart" to make your case-by-case argument is an insufficiently nuanced breakdown. What about other axes, such as work ethic, or affluence, or...?
  - bugsy 16y ago
    Yeah, you are right, but some sort of manageable grouping is needed to make the point since this is a conversation and not an academic journal so I don't feel it would be appropriate or needed to completely break down every possible combination. "Smart" means kids that would be in gifted programs which don't exist anymore. "Not smart" is kids who go on to be plumbers. This is not sufficient itself since there are smart people that go into plumbing, and there are dumb people that get degrees. But it's the general idea that the current system of training everyone in identical classes using a curriculum created by bureaucrats, politicians and businessmen selling textbooks in order to pass a standardized multiple choice test is not an ideal one. I hope that is clear.
    - pohl 16y ago
      ...some sort of manageable grouping is needed to make the point since this is a conversation and not an academic journal... True, you don't need to be quite so formal here, but can you really say that you've "made the point" if it's based on hand-waving and dubious generalities? I ask because you're trying to undermine why the Gates Foundation would look at dropouts as a metric — a point that you can't make with such a transparently flawed model. At best you can say that you've created an illusion of having made a point.
jwwest 16y ago
As a drop out, I personally found the reasons hit pretty close to home. However, I think the assumption that all drop outs never do anything education wise again is misleading. I ended up getting my GED, going to college and then got my graduate degree. Dropping out of high school does not equate a bad future. In fact, I believe if I hadnt had a few extra years to figure out what exactly I wanted out of life, I would have failed spectacularly in college.
keithba 16y ago
I felt I had to drop out of my high school because of the one-size-fits all mentality. Outside of a couple of teachers who tried to attempted to challenge me, the rest of the administration felt fine with placing me in classes that were incredibly boring for me. And no one was willing to help me figure out how to graduate early. So I dropped out at 15, got a GED, and enrolled in college a year later. All with no guidance from any adult (including my mom - who for obscure religious reasons was anti-higher education.) At 19 I had to drop of college to help support my mom who was sick and never did get my degree. Since then, I've been successful (shipped some major products, published books, etc). But, it many years to see the current educational system as anything but corrupt and useless for many years after this experience.
smokeyj 16y ago
I think education needs to have an objective. We need to say, when you leave highschool, you will be able to make money. You will have a marketable skill that will enable you to provide for yourself. You should be able to fix a car, do some plumbing, wire a house, or SOMETHING. Instead we're robotic zombies memorizing a series of worthless facts. Facts are not valuable. You cannot eat facts for dinner. Information is not the same commodity it was 50 years ago. This idea that we can mass manufacture intelligent students by cramming them in a class room, reciting curriculum, and bubbling scantrons is nonsense. Real education can't be institutionalized like this, it requires hands on learning and personalized instruction. With tablet computers, a students curriculum should dynamically adapt to the students learning needs. I feel like our education is watered down because there's no competition to teach students. The State has a monopoly on education and we're suffering the unfortunate side effects of a centrally planned industry.
- thematt 16y ago
  Interesting point about information not being the same commodity is was 50 years ago. It actually seems like information is an even more valuable commodity than it was back then. We seem to be turning into an information based economy where the low level skills that people might learn in high school are quickly becoming irrelevant in today's highly automated, computerized society.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    There's a difference between knowing a list of facts, and being able to apply it. Information nowadays is cheap. A quick search can reveal almost any fact you want. Analyzing a problem given the information available, processing it, creating stuff based on that information: that's the stuff that still can't be automated yet. That said, I think high school curriculum in general is fine. It's the universities that need an overhaul.
MichaelGG 16y ago
I "dropped out" around 7th grade. I remember asking the teacher "why are we learning X?" "Well, in 8th grade you'll need it!" This Q&A recursed until I realised it was pointless to talk to her. In 10th grade, I moved out of the country and didn't enroll anymore. Business-wise, this worked out great; more commercial experience programming, earlier. A decade later, I discovered learning is fun. Learning how the universe works should be amazingly interesting! Instead, I had teachers that would say things like "carbon-14 dating is a trick by scientists that hate god". Sigh.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  What's an example of X?
  - bartonfink 16y ago
    This is going to sound unpopular given the audience here, but I'd bet most examples of "X" in this context will be corners of math. Math tends to be more cumulative than most other subjects taught in high school, and as such it's the subject that jumps to mind when the answer "next year" makes sense when someone asks "when am I going to use X?" Trigonometry, for example, or matrix math are highly esoteric in the context of a usual high-school student, yet they show up all over the damned place when you get out of high school and into more advanced studies. This is a real shame because math is essentially a vocabulary for solving problems and there should be dozens of answers a teacher could give to that ? besides "next year."
georgieporgie 16y ago
On the subject of relevance and motivation, the one and only thing that encouraged me to do any actual work in school was when my father offered to pay me a bonus for B's and A's.. In retrospect, it's amazing how relevant everything suddenly became. They say it's bad, but it worked well for me. Also: the reason that High School teachers can't tell you why you need to learn x is that they don't know themselves. Having come into contact with a few teachers as an adult, I'm appalled at how little they know. They seemed a lot smarter when I was 14.
- zasz 16y ago
  I don't know about point 1. My parents paid me for good grades, and my attitude towards learning is a little warped now, to say the least. (They were also Tiger Parents, though. Motivation is a tricky thing to get right.) For point 2, definitely. I asked my math teacher once what a rigorous definition for a tangent was, and she couldn't give me one. Blah. All these unhappy postdocs and grad students should teach high school.
tomlin 16y ago
I dropped out for several reasons, one being an unstable childhood, but I don't look back on it. I am successful and generally consider myself to be a well-rounded, critical-thinking individual. None of which school had anything to do with. You can cross parenting off of that list as well. I would like to see different approaches to education. I tend to see worth in our current system from kindergarten until about grade 5, then it seems to go awry. From grade 5, forward, I would like to see a "Pull" system implemented, whereby the students pull topics from a full-circle repository of topics, interests, dialects. Give students the tools to find what they will be good at and give them the space to learn the material they are interested in. Give guidance over teaching. Having been diagnosed with "A.D.D", I found the curriculum was designed for one type of person and was absolutely inefficient for a relatively large sized minority of students. Yes, the Farmer vs. Hunter argument treads heavily here, but that's the point. Most students are great with tasking, others have proficiency of hyperfocus. As a society, we should acknowledge that our current vocational system is hurtful more than helpful. In a system where I could "Pull" interests, I would have faired much better. I know this because this is how I learn new languages, or better implementations of the technology I use today. As many HNer's know, exposure to data and insightful debate opens up new topics or technologies that you would otherwise be unaware of. Why wouldn't this concept apply to education as well?
etherael 16y ago
I left school in year nine (Australia) for two reasons Primary) I never learned a single thing in school that I had not already learned from self study. I am a hardcore autodidact so I don't take this alone as evidence that school is just not useful, but it certainly doesn't seem to be that rare, either. Tertiary) I was offered a job working with computers for what was an extremely large amount for a fourteen year old in 1994 (50k AUD). The worst aspect of this however is that for a significant period of time after I had dismissed school as not useful, my only experience of school had been compulsory education, which I now know to be enormously removed from the kind of education one gets at a university. I feel like my very negative experience of education at an early age poisoned me against higher education, and if I had a single recommendation for pre university schooling it would be that it should be a lot more like university.
wil2k 16y ago
Just check these interviews about Education from this page: http://www.thebyteshow.com/JosephPFarrell.html http://www.thebyteshow.com/JosephPFarrell.html To be precise: http://www.thebyteshow.com/Audio/JosephPFarrell/JosephPFarrell_MagicOfSocialEngineering7_29Jan2011_TBS.mp3 http://www.thebyteshow.com/Audio/JosephPFarrell/JosephPFarre... http://www.thebyteshow.com/Audio/JosephPFarrell/JosephPFarrell_MagicOfSocialEngineering9_16Feb2011_TBS.mp3 http://www.thebyteshow.com/Audio/JosephPFarrell/JosephPFarre... I think what's described in those interviews is very telling..
mannicken 16y ago
I dropped out of high school partially because my bouts of depressive laziness contrasted with manic hyperactivity aren't well-stacked against the constant intense effort that the educational system requires. You could literally see quarters of steady grades (sometimes 4.0s) followed by quarters with a bunch of Fs in them. I was taking community college classes instead of 11/12th grade so it wasn't a big "OH I'M DROPPING OUT" thing for me, I just didn't turn in some portfolio because I was working on a different project and honestly didn't give a shit about some piece of paper. Perhaps some part of me just wanted to fuck with the system and prove how useless the pieces of paper are when compared with the ability to create cool shit. Yes, I would say the my inner rebellious nature wouldn't allow me to have any formal education. I am one lab class away from an associate's degree and taking anything but lab classes in community college :) I am only 19 so I really do not know whether I am on a path to drug-addled self-destruction (as a typical high school dropout) or something else.

45 points by robg 16y ago

It's interesting to see the reasoning and the regret (most people wish they had finished). However, I wonder what sort of bias is introduced looking backward. Are these the real underlying reasons for dropping out or just surface excuses retrospectively used?

bane 16y ago

One of the major problems in the U.S. is the one-size-fits-all mentality. Thousands of kids are sent to enormous mega-schools and are expected to be stamped through a unified educational process like a piece of mass production. The result is that the public school system becomes more like a holding pen than an educational opportunity. While the U.S. does do a pretty good job of identifying gifted students and herding them off to more specialized education, it does a very poor job of identifying students for more vocational training. In many systems, students are segregated early...perhaps middle school...and receive very different educations depending on their chances of going to college and getting a degree or vocational school and learning a trade. (of course I say this now with a handful of degrees under my belt when I would have been an obvious High Schooler for the vocational education...so it's not a perfect idea by any stretch)

coffeedrinker 16y ago
This. And what goes along with it: Not pushing everyone to the same end. For example, learning math has many valuable aspects. However, learning advanced math is not valuable for everyone. In fact, it becomes detrimental to the student who struggles with it. Rather than find the subjects that are interesting and worthwhile, students are in situations where they perform poorly and will never benefit from it. The school system (from the state on down) thinks that requiring more is the solution but they should focus on doing less and doing it very well. Rather than adding more advanced classes to students who already are not benefiting from them, a solid basic foundation should be given and then move the kids into trades and vocations that suit their interests and abilities.
- ry0ohki 16y ago
  I remember I'd always question my high school math teachers "why do I need this? What will I use this for in real life?". They never had great answers (although in my old age I can now think of good reasons), but providing real life useful context around what is taught I think would help a lot of kids understand the importance.
  - WalterBright 16y ago
    I always give an answer given to me by a used car salesman. Those who don't understand math can and will get rooked for $$$$ by those who sell them financing.
    - klbarry 16y ago
      True, but that is more along the lines of quantitative thinking. All the specific math actually useful to most people (compound interes, depreciation, etc) could be taught in a one semester course.
      - bugsy 16y ago
        Yes, the discussions on math regarding high school always seem strange to me. There is a lot of talk about the relevance of calculus and trigonometry (which I personally think are relevant and should be understood, trigonometry is required for woodworking and crafts for example), but the reality is that regardless of whatever classes they have supposedly passed the typical high school graduate has just basic arithmetic skills and many have a competency level below that, requiring a calculator in order to make change from a dollar. They have third grade level skills and nothing more. But the reality is that basic arithmetic skills are taught well and rapidly throughout the rest of the industrialized world. There are various reasons for it and the parents are not to blame, nor are "higher standards" and homework the answer. For kids that are 17 and can't reduce a fraction the answer is not to require them to take calculus next. Alas, by the time one is 14 it is too late to be learning the basics. There is no excuse to be spending so many hours in school and have students that are passed on year after year without knowing basic math and reading skills, and the usual big talk from politicians about high standards won't fix what is wrong.

awakeasleep 16y ago

Found a few aspects of this article frustrating. First, the linked "study" isn't a study at all, it's a summary written for public consumption. Second, we get no information about how the figures were derived- were these people presented with a multiple choice survey? What choices were available on that survey? Third, the whole study is built on people's self-reported analysis of their own motivations. While valuable, I know that kind of data isn't fully reliable.

bugsy 16y ago

I don't know why Gates is advocating for fewer drop outs. Drop outs are one of the few things that is working for kids. Schools segregate on age now not ability. For smart kids, school is frustrating and holds them back. It is better for them to leave school at 15 and transfer to a community college where they can take control of their education. For not-smart kids, vocational education from 15-17 leading to apprenticeships gives them something of interest and useful to them. For average kids, the system might work if the other two groups who are frustrated were channelled towards more useful pursuits than sitting bored, and sometimes forced to take amphetamines like Ritalin just to have the appearance of being focused.

pohl 16y ago
I think the way you've partitioned the universal set of kids into "smart" and "not smart" to make your case-by-case argument is an insufficiently nuanced breakdown. What about other axes, such as work ethic, or affluence, or...?
- bugsy 16y ago
  Yeah, you are right, but some sort of manageable grouping is needed to make the point since this is a conversation and not an academic journal so I don't feel it would be appropriate or needed to completely break down every possible combination. "Smart" means kids that would be in gifted programs which don't exist anymore. "Not smart" is kids who go on to be plumbers. This is not sufficient itself since there are smart people that go into plumbing, and there are dumb people that get degrees. But it's the general idea that the current system of training everyone in identical classes using a curriculum created by bureaucrats, politicians and businessmen selling textbooks in order to pass a standardized multiple choice test is not an ideal one. I hope that is clear.
  - pohl 16y ago
    ...some sort of manageable grouping is needed to make the point since this is a conversation and not an academic journal... True, you don't need to be quite so formal here, but can you really say that you've "made the point" if it's based on hand-waving and dubious generalities? I ask because you're trying to undermine why the Gates Foundation would look at dropouts as a metric — a point that you can't make with such a transparently flawed model. At best you can say that you've created an illusion of having made a point.

jwwest 16y ago

As a drop out, I personally found the reasons hit pretty close to home. However, I think the assumption that all drop outs never do anything education wise again is misleading. I ended up getting my GED, going to college and then got my graduate degree. Dropping out of high school does not equate a bad future. In fact, I believe if I hadnt had a few extra years to figure out what exactly I wanted out of life, I would have failed spectacularly in college.

keithba 16y ago

I felt I had to drop out of my high school because of the one-size-fits all mentality. Outside of a couple of teachers who tried to attempted to challenge me, the rest of the administration felt fine with placing me in classes that were incredibly boring for me. And no one was willing to help me figure out how to graduate early. So I dropped out at 15, got a GED, and enrolled in college a year later. All with no guidance from any adult (including my mom - who for obscure religious reasons was anti-higher education.) At 19 I had to drop of college to help support my mom who was sick and never did get my degree. Since then, I've been successful (shipped some major products, published books, etc). But, it many years to see the current educational system as anything but corrupt and useless for many years after this experience.

smokeyj 16y ago

I think education needs to have an objective. We need to say, when you leave highschool, you will be able to make money. You will have a marketable skill that will enable you to provide for yourself. You should be able to fix a car, do some plumbing, wire a house, or SOMETHING. Instead we're robotic zombies memorizing a series of worthless facts. Facts are not valuable. You cannot eat facts for dinner. Information is not the same commodity it was 50 years ago. This idea that we can mass manufacture intelligent students by cramming them in a class room, reciting curriculum, and bubbling scantrons is nonsense. Real education can't be institutionalized like this, it requires hands on learning and personalized instruction. With tablet computers, a students curriculum should dynamically adapt to the students learning needs. I feel like our education is watered down because there's no competition to teach students. The State has a monopoly on education and we're suffering the unfortunate side effects of a centrally planned industry.

thematt 16y ago
Interesting point about information not being the same commodity is was 50 years ago. It actually seems like information is an even more valuable commodity than it was back then. We seem to be turning into an information based economy where the low level skills that people might learn in high school are quickly becoming irrelevant in today's highly automated, computerized society.
- bad_user 16y ago
  There's a difference between knowing a list of facts, and being able to apply it. Information nowadays is cheap. A quick search can reveal almost any fact you want. Analyzing a problem given the information available, processing it, creating stuff based on that information: that's the stuff that still can't be automated yet. That said, I think high school curriculum in general is fine. It's the universities that need an overhaul.

MichaelGG 16y ago

I "dropped out" around 7th grade. I remember asking the teacher "why are we learning X?" "Well, in 8th grade you'll need it!" This Q&A recursed until I realised it was pointless to talk to her. In 10th grade, I moved out of the country and didn't enroll anymore. Business-wise, this worked out great; more commercial experience programming, earlier. A decade later, I discovered learning is fun. Learning how the universe works should be amazingly interesting! Instead, I had teachers that would say things like "carbon-14 dating is a trick by scientists that hate god". Sigh.

kenjackson 16y ago
What's an example of X?
- bartonfink 16y ago
  This is going to sound unpopular given the audience here, but I'd bet most examples of "X" in this context will be corners of math. Math tends to be more cumulative than most other subjects taught in high school, and as such it's the subject that jumps to mind when the answer "next year" makes sense when someone asks "when am I going to use X?" Trigonometry, for example, or matrix math are highly esoteric in the context of a usual high-school student, yet they show up all over the damned place when you get out of high school and into more advanced studies. This is a real shame because math is essentially a vocabulary for solving problems and there should be dozens of answers a teacher could give to that ? besides "next year."

georgieporgie 16y ago

On the subject of relevance and motivation, the one and only thing that encouraged me to do any actual work in school was when my father offered to pay me a bonus for B's and A's.. In retrospect, it's amazing how relevant everything suddenly became. They say it's bad, but it worked well for me. Also: the reason that High School teachers can't tell you why you need to learn x is that they don't know themselves. Having come into contact with a few teachers as an adult, I'm appalled at how little they know. They seemed a lot smarter when I was 14.

zasz 16y ago
I don't know about point 1. My parents paid me for good grades, and my attitude towards learning is a little warped now, to say the least. (They were also Tiger Parents, though. Motivation is a tricky thing to get right.) For point 2, definitely. I asked my math teacher once what a rigorous definition for a tangent was, and she couldn't give me one. Blah. All these unhappy postdocs and grad students should teach high school.

tomlin 16y ago

I dropped out for several reasons, one being an unstable childhood, but I don't look back on it. I am successful and generally consider myself to be a well-rounded, critical-thinking individual. None of which school had anything to do with. You can cross parenting off of that list as well. I would like to see different approaches to education. I tend to see worth in our current system from kindergarten until about grade 5, then it seems to go awry. From grade 5, forward, I would like to see a "Pull" system implemented, whereby the students pull topics from a full-circle repository of topics, interests, dialects. Give students the tools to find what they will be good at and give them the space to learn the material they are interested in. Give guidance over teaching. Having been diagnosed with "A.D.D", I found the curriculum was designed for one type of person and was absolutely inefficient for a relatively large sized minority of students. Yes, the Farmer vs. Hunter argument treads heavily here, but that's the point. Most students are great with tasking, others have proficiency of hyperfocus. As a society, we should acknowledge that our current vocational system is hurtful more than helpful. In a system where I could "Pull" interests, I would have faired much better. I know this because this is how I learn new languages, or better implementations of the technology I use today. As many HNer's know, exposure to data and insightful debate opens up new topics or technologies that you would otherwise be unaware of. Why wouldn't this concept apply to education as well?

etherael 16y ago

I left school in year nine (Australia) for two reasons Primary) I never learned a single thing in school that I had not already learned from self study. I am a hardcore autodidact so I don't take this alone as evidence that school is just not useful, but it certainly doesn't seem to be that rare, either. Tertiary) I was offered a job working with computers for what was an extremely large amount for a fourteen year old in 1994 (50k AUD). The worst aspect of this however is that for a significant period of time after I had dismissed school as not useful, my only experience of school had been compulsory education, which I now know to be enormously removed from the kind of education one gets at a university. I feel like my very negative experience of education at an early age poisoned me against higher education, and if I had a single recommendation for pre university schooling it would be that it should be a lot more like university.

wil2k 16y ago

Just check these interviews about Education from this page: http://www.thebyteshow.com/JosephPFarrell.html http://www.thebyteshow.com/JosephPFarrell.html To be precise: http://www.thebyteshow.com/Audio/JosephPFarrell/JosephPFarrell_MagicOfSocialEngineering7_29Jan2011_TBS.mp3 http://www.thebyteshow.com/Audio/JosephPFarrell/JosephPFarre... http://www.thebyteshow.com/Audio/JosephPFarrell/JosephPFarrell_MagicOfSocialEngineering9_16Feb2011_TBS.mp3 http://www.thebyteshow.com/Audio/JosephPFarrell/JosephPFarre... I think what's described in those interviews is very telling..

mannicken 16y ago

I dropped out of high school partially because my bouts of depressive laziness contrasted with manic hyperactivity aren't well-stacked against the constant intense effort that the educational system requires. You could literally see quarters of steady grades (sometimes 4.0s) followed by quarters with a bunch of Fs in them. I was taking community college classes instead of 11/12th grade so it wasn't a big "OH I'M DROPPING OUT" thing for me, I just didn't turn in some portfolio because I was working on a different project and honestly didn't give a shit about some piece of paper. Perhaps some part of me just wanted to fuck with the system and prove how useless the pieces of paper are when compared with the ability to create cool shit. Yes, I would say the my inner rebellious nature wouldn't allow me to have any formal education. I am one lab class away from an associate's degree and taking anything but lab classes in community college :) I am only 19 so I really do not know whether I am on a path to drug-addled self-destruction (as a typical high school dropout) or something else.