Adolescent childbearing and high school completion in the 1980s: have things changed?

Abstract

More adolescent mothers are now graduating from high school than ever before. Since the 1950s, the high school completion rate of women who became mothers at age 17 or younger has nearly tripled--from 19 percent in 1958 to 56 percent in 1986. However, graduation rates did not increase equally for all racial and socioeconomic groups, and the increases did not occur in the same periods for all groups. Black mothers who were school-age when they had their first child made their greatest gains in graduation rates between 1958 and 1975, while their white counterparts made their greatest gains between 1975 and 1986. By 1986, black women who were 17 or younger when their first child was born were more likely to have graduated than similar white women--61 percent and 54 percent, respectively. Nevertheless, when overall levels of high school graduation are considered, white women were more likely than black women to have graduated. Regardless of race, women from more advantaged backgrounds were more likely to be graduates than were those from less advantaged backgrounds, and the younger the women were when their first child was born, the less likely they were to be graduates.