High School Dropout Rate

An increasing high school dropout rate is due to the fact that our education system is a grade-based system, that uses standardized tests to measure ones intelligence and achievements. Students who don’t measure up as well as others in terms of their grades, begin to quit at an earlier stage in education, with the belief they aren’t good enough to succeed in further education. With education inflation, the grade standards and pressure for students, are at a constant rise, which makes it more difficult for students to excel. For example, if a student was once a B grade student, they could easily be downgraded to a low C, because of the increasing competitive rivalry amongst students. As shown in Figure 3. There is a large percentage of students

Therefore, college tuition fees are set to increase due to the increasing demand for higher education. Being one of the largest institutions in society, there are tremendous overhead costs that need to be covered, such as, cost of supplies, replacements of breakages, and many others. Moreover, there are costs fixated to the tenure system as well. Accordingly, more than half of university staff, in a single institution, are now given tenure. Having tenure, they are offered sabbatical leaves which should be given out every 7th year, but are now given out every 3rd year. However, teachers and lecturers in Canada have one of the most powerful trade unions, which means that often times, their demands are met. As education being an extremely important institution, schools and universities would not be able to function without the teachers. Presently, degrees no longer hold as much worth as they used to in the professional world today, which in turn causes a great deal of graduates falling out of work and going back into classrooms, to obtain a higher degree. According to Inflation Data, "Many students who graduate and can’t find a job initially will head back to the only world they know and the only one they’ve found success in: the classroom. In effect, the college degree costs more while being worth less—inflation.” Cost of college fees are increasing to tackle the issue of

the new policy of grade deflation had successfully curb the issue, as more students were receiving B grades instead of A grades. However, there had been a lot of controversy in the method Princeton had used. Many students felt as though their grades were being pulled down for no reason. Effective October 2014, Princeton University made the decision to remove their grade deflation policy. This was due to the fact that the policy had neglected to achieve one of its starting objectives: to maintain a “fair and consistent” grading standard across Princeton. The report from the Ad Hoc Committee states, “We have come to feel strongly that departments should spend their time developing clear and meaningful evaluative rubrics for work within their disciplines rather than aligning grades to meet specific numeric targets.” Many other prestige universities feel that their choice to dismiss the policy was in fact a step backwards, and “may discourage future attempts to formally combat grade infaltion”