Examining the Multiple Trajectories Associated with Dropping Out of High School: A Growth Mixture Model Analysis

Historically, students who fail to graduate from secondary school are considered as a single category of school dropouts. However, emerging literature indicates that there may be multiple subgroups of high school dropouts, termed a dropout typology. The authors’ purpose was to assess the extent to which a typology of dropouts was present in a large national dataset and to estimate the influence of the known covariates of dropping out on each of the subgroups. A growth mixture model was estimated using the Education Longitudinal Study 2002 (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.) dataset and noncumulative grade point average during the first 3 semesters of high school. The model identified 2 main subgroups associated with dropping out, which accounted for 24.6% of the sample but contained 91.8% of the dropouts.