ABSTRACT
The notion that dropping out of school constituted a contemporary social problem perhaps emerged with the intense educational scrutiny precipitated by the launch of Sputnik. Prior to that, the termination of one’s education short of high school graduation was a relatively common practice free of social stigmatism (Greene, 1966). A 1947 Department of Labor study of youth out of school and in the labor market found that, among 14–17-year-olds, progress beyond the eighth grade was the exception rather than the rule (Johnson and Legg, 1948). While there had been an emerging recognition that dropping out was limiting in terms of one’s upward social mobility, it was the technological revolution—fueled by fears of America’s potential educational inadequacies, ignited by the space race, and characterized by an increasing inability to absorb the dropout into the work force—that initiated a new view which identified dropouts as serious social risks.
