St. Louis Area Graduation Rate versus Housing Costs



I saw an article on stltoday.com yesterday about the new 4 year high school graduation rate formula that also linked to the graduation rates of all the St. Louis area school districts. I found some of the numbers on the big chart quite interesting. I thought I would take those numbers, sort them and then put them on a chart along with the median home sale prices in those districts (from blockshopper.com) to see how well that correlates. Note that I capped the home prices at $250K, although Clayton, Ladue and Rockwood all went over that median amount (at $530K, $414K and $280K, respectively.) At both the top and at the bottom the obvious districts are there, but some of the ones in the middle are interesting. Some of the "out of place" districts are obvious, like University City where there are a lot of expensive homes, but also a public high school known to not have the highest graduation rate. The two I found the most interesting, though were Parkway and Jennings, both in the middle of the pack with a graduation rate of about 85%. I would have expected Parkway to be closer to the 90+% pack and to place above schools like Maplewood and Bayless. I expected Jennings to be down with the under 75% crowd where the homes cost much less, but they actually have a higher graduation rate than Fort Zumwalt, Pattonville or St. Charles where homes cost significantly more.

What is actually more interesting to view than the graduation rates are the percentage of students who do NOT graduate in 4 years (i.e. 100% - the graduation rate). Here Clayton's 98.5% graduation rate means only 1.5% of Clayton students do not graduate, only a third of the 4.5% of Ladue students who do not graduate (the second lowest number). They are the only two districts with less than 5% not graduating, and if you increase the limit to 10% not graduating you gain Kirkwood, Mehlville, Valley Park, Webster, Brentwood and Rockwood. All the districts except for two have less than 30% not graduating, the only exceptions being Normandy and the St. Louis City public schools. It is actually pretty scary to see how high that number is for many school districts. It is hard to imagine that about 1 out of every 7 students in Parkway does not graduate in 4 years.

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