Exploring High School Completion and Societal Challenges
Going to an underfunded high school in a predominantly low-income area, I became very aware of how societal factors affected my classmates. My school strived to put socioeconomically disadvantaged students through high school and send them to higher education, but that’s not the case for every school. This led me to explore various societal factors that contribute to high school completion. Using the following societal factors: the percentage of children in poverty, teen birth rates, and food insecurity to answer: How do high school completion rates correlate with various indicators of societal well-being, and what implications do these correlations hold?
My first visualization explores the relationship between high school completion and children in poverty. This creates the question of how poverty affects high school completion rates, as well as explores the idea of how powerful education can be for people.
I came into this believing that there would not be a strong correlation between the two variables because I had this prior assumption that school policies or support systems would support socio-economic disadvantaged students during their high school years similarly to my high school. The correlation between the percentage of high school completion and the percentage of children in poverty was -0.65. This indicates that as the rate of high school completion increases, the percentage of children in poverty decreases. This also indicates that high school completion has a way of taking children out of poverty.
Looking closer at this, education can be a tool that allows people to break out of poverty. Higher levels of education have been shown to open up opportunities for higher-paying jobs and possibly break the cycle of poverty. Not only that, individuals who attain higher education could be inspirations for these communities to follow suit and “get out” of poverty. Therefore, we could say that an increase in high school completion rates is likely a factor that could contribute to reducing poverty among children.
For my second visualization, I decided to explore teen birth rates and high school completion. This leads to understanding if completing high school would impact the prevalence of teen pregnancies.
Prior to looking at these two variables, I came in with the idea of how the teen pregnancies, I’ve seen, led to mothers dropping out of high school and not completing it. There are various factors during pregnancy that make it harder for teen moms to not be able to focus on school. Within the graph, the correlation of this relationship was -0.70. This was a strong negative correlation as high school completion rates increase, and teen birth rates decrease.
Looking closer at the graph, I came up with how completing high school is an achievement and milestone in many people’s lives. So seeing a strong negative correlation, obtaining a high school diploma and completing high school is a goal for many students which made me think of how students who want to complete high school have this belief to make long-term goals which could delay family planning.
For my third visualization, I decided to explore food insecurity and high school completion. I specifically remember how in school nourishing and feeding students ensures that students are able to learn throughout school, so I specifically wanted to explore this idea.
I came into this believing that food insecurity should have a strong effect on high school completion as there are multiple sources explaining how hungry kids do not learn because of various reasons like inability to focus due to hunger or sluggishness and tiredness from not having enough nutrition. For this visualization, the correlation was -0.60, as high school completion rates increase, food insecurity decreases.
Looking further into this, high school completion could lead to higher paying jobs which reduce financial instability and lead to having enough to afford sufficient food. More and more jobs require some sort of degree to make sufficient money to survive, so having a high school degree is advantageous.
In conclusion, these correlation observations between various societal factors and high school completion hint that education can be transformative for addressing complex societal issues. There are various causal relationships that can be interpreted through these visualizations. Still, it is important to understand that correlation does not mean causation, especially in issues as complex as these.
