Commissioned Reports

Cost of Dropping OutCost Estimates of Dropping Out of High School in Canada

February 4 2009

By Olena Hankivsky

Overview

The failure to complete high school has enormous fiscal implications in terms of expenditures on social services and programs, education, employment, criminality, lower economic productivity, and health.

The goal of this study is to present a portrait of economic costs—to the state and to the individual—associated with non-completion of high school in Canada. Among its findings:

Report resources

  • High-school dropouts cost Canada's social assistance programs and criminal justice system more than $1.3 billion annually:
    • the public cost of social assistance amounts to an average of $4,000 a year for each person who drops out of high school, or a total of $969 million; and
    • costs to the criminal justice system total an average of $220 per dropout, or $350 million a year.
  • Canadians who drop out of high school can expect to earn at least $3,000 a year less than those who have graduated from high-school but not continued on to post-secondary education.
  • Those who quit high school lose also about $8,000 a year as a result of poorer health, which leads to lost income from illness and health-related expenses,

Table 1: Tangible costs of high school non-completion in Canada (2008 dollars)
  Estimated cost per dropout Aggregated total in Canada
  Annual Lifetime Annual Lifetime
Tangible Costs        

Health (Private)a

$8,098

$211,471b

$23.8 billion

$623 billionb

Social Assistance (Public)

$4,230

  

$969 million

Crime (Public)

$224

  

$350 million

Labour and Employment

      

Earning loss (Private)

$3,491

$104,222c

$10.3 billion

$307 billionc

Tax revenue loss (Public)

$226

$6,882

$378 million

$11.5 billion

Revenue loss in employment insurance premium (Public)

$68

$2,063

$201 million

$6.1 billion

Employment insurance cost (Public)

$2,767

  

$1.1 billion

a Data on public costs are not available.
b “Lifetime” costs related to health reflect costs over a span of 35 years.
c “Lifetime” costs related to income reflect earning loss over a 35-year span (assuming lifetime earnings start from age 20 through 54)

Cost Estimates of Dropping Out of High School in Canada (PDF, 957 KB) was written by Simon Fraser University professor Olena Hankivsky, and commissioned by the Canadian Council on Learning.

CCL has also produced a Lessons in Learning article based on this report, "No drop in the bucket: the high costs of dropping out."

For information regarding the report's methodology, please refer to the Technical Report (PDF, 858 KB).

 

In Canada, as in other jurisdictions, an “adequate education” is generally considered at minimum to include a high school diploma.

Au Canada ainsi que dans d’autres territoires, on considère généralement que, pour posséder une éducation « appropriée », il faut au minimum avoir un diplôme d’études secondaires