New report: Diploma Attainment Among Teen Mothers

Posted by on February 08, 2010

A third of teen moms have no diploma or GED

New Child Trends research finds that one in three (34%) young women who had been teen mothers did not earn a high school diploma or a GED, compared with only 6% of young women who had not had a teen birth. Among the other findings presented in a fact sheet entitled Diploma Attainment Among Teen Mothers.

http://www.childtrends.org/Files//Child_Trends-2010_01_22_FS_DiplomaAttainment.pdf

Slightly more than one-half (51%) of teen mothers received a high school diploma by the age of 22, compared with 89% of young women who had not given birth during their teen years. A higher proportion of teen mothers earned a GED (15%) than did their counterparts who had not experienced a teen birth (5%).

Younger teen mothers are less likely than older teen mothers to earn a diploma.  Among young women who had a child before the age of 18, only 38% earned a high school diploma by the age of 22, compared with 60% of those who were 18 or 19 at the time that they had their first child.

Black teen mothers are more likely than Hispanic or white teen mothers to earn a diploma or GED by age 22.  More than two-thirds (67%) of black women who had a child before the age of 18 earned either a high school diploma or GED, compared with 55% of white women and 46% of Hispanic women in this category.

Data used in this study were drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 Cohort.