Alberta’s high school completion rates show slight improvement
Alberta’s attempts to improve on the province’s crummy high school completion rates may be paying off. The provincial government released numbers on May 2 for students who received their high school diploma continued on to post-secondary studies or dropped out without indication they would return to complete high school.
In the 2012-13 school year 82 per cent of students completed their high school studies within five years of beginning Grade 10; 3.3 per cent of the student body dropped out in 2013. That is a slight improvement over rates in 2009 when Alberta Education launched its High School Completion Strategic Framework in response to chronically poor high school completion numbers in the province. In the 2008-09 school year 79 per cent of high school students obtained a diploma within five years of beginning Grade 10 and the dropout rate was 4.3 per cent.
The government framework aims to improve high school completion by making secondary study requirements more flexible offering courses that give high school and post-secondary credits simultaneously and creating curricula that students may find more personally engaging.
High school outcomes vary widely across the province. Alberta Education’s most recent Accountability Pillar reports state students are most successful in the East Central Francophone Region in St. Paul with a 95 per cent completion rate and 0 per cent drop out rate. At the other end of the spectrum Northland School Division in Peace River has a five-year completion rate of 23 per cent and an annual dropout rate of 11 per cent though the situation there has been steadily improving since 2009.
In Calgary 3.5 per cent of public high school students and 1.5 per cent of Catholic school district students dropped out last year. The five-year completion rates in Calgary also differed markedly between the public and Catholic system with 80 per cent and 86.4 per cent of students obtaining their diplomas respectively. Over the past five years an average of 60 per cent of high school graduates entered post-secondary studies.
