This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
In the early 1990s, Jim Heckman traveled to Corpus Christi, Texas.
He was there to see something that had been described to him as a miracle.
It was a program for students who had dropped out of high school.
And they said, you know, we have a program which will take high school dropouts, people who had dropped out in 9th grade or before, actually, and converted them into high school graduates within two to three months in our program, and then we send them out to the workplace.
So I said, well, this is amazing.
The program that gave young people a second chance is now known widely across the country.
It's called the GED, which was a.
Program which students studied for a test, and at the end of the test, they were certified as legitimate high school graduates.
There were plenty of individual success stories, but Jim is an economist, and he wanted to know whether, on average, people with a GED were as successful as those with a high school diploma.
He started by looking at their test scores.
What really surprised me was their test scores were virtually the same.
Within a few months, the GED program was allowing students to catch up with peers who had spent years in high school.
But then Jim looked further.
Were GED grads holding onto jobs and long term relationships, staying out of trouble?
If you looked at the GEDs, you realized they weren't doing so well.
They were likely, it turned out, if they got a job, to quit the job or be fired, if they went into marriage or some partnership.
How stable were those compared to the ordinary high school graduates?
Much less stable.