America Goes to High School

Another component of the modern American standard of living that arrived in the 1920s was the American high school, complete with 45-minute periods, diverse curricula, academic tracking, and, of course, bands and athletic teams. The increase in enrollment and graduation rates during the 1920s and 1930s was astonishing, as shown in Table 22.4. In 1910, less than 10 percent of American 17-year-olds had graduated from high school. By 1938, almost half were graduates. Graduating from high school had become a standard rite of passage. The United States, moreover, led the way internationally. By the middle of the twentieth century, a large gap in years of secondary schooling per capita had opened between the United States and the rest of the industrial nations.

Why did the “High School Movement” have so much success in the United States? Research by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz (2008, chapters 5 and 6) has clarified the underlying forces. First, the rate of return from going to high school was extremely high (the extra income earned after graduation compared with the earnings forgone). In addition, communities were willing to build and staff high schools so that the children and grandchildren of the people living there would have more economic and social opportunities. The kinds of communities that had the most social cohesion, and therefore were most likely to vote for high taxes to finance high schools, were not located in the big cities with their diverse immigrant populations. Instead, it was the farming communities of the Midwest—in Iowa and Nebraska, for example—that led the way in establishing high schools. The high school movement provides a further illustration of Economic Reasoning Propositions 3, incentives matter (high rates of return encouraged young people to stay in school); and 4, laws and rules matter (local finance and control of public schooling encouraged the early adoption of the high school in the Middle West).