Here’s something I know nothing about

Paul Campos writes:

Does it seem at all plausible that, as per the CDC, rates of smoking among people with GED certificates are double those among high school dropouts and high school graduates?

My reply: It does seem a bit odd, but I don’t know who gets GED’s. There could be correlations with age and region of the country. It’s hard to know what to do with this sort of demographically-unadjusted number.

29 thoughts on “Here’s something I know nothing about

      • If that was true, dropouts should smoke even more then GEDs, right? Prison seems like a good explanation. I don’t see why immigrants from high-smoking countries would be getting lots of GEDs, either.

        • More than 500,000 people passed the GED in 2013. Of which the prison component was around 7000 only. Granted this was only federal prisons, but still, doesn’t seem that large a fraction.

        • That’s people who passed the GED in 2013, though, not GED holders, which is what this is about.

          I think the most likely explanation is they didn’t get many GED people in their sample and it’s skewed (with prisons as one potential culprit), but it’s hard to tell from the linked paper and table.

        • Could be. I was only addressing Michael Bishop’s explanation that’s based on “large share of GED are awarded to people in prison”.

          I’m implicitly assuming 2013 data looked like (say) 1990. Which itself is a bad assumption.

        • The real issue is that we are all adrift because they didn’t publish so much as the number of people with GEDs in the sample, let alone their composition.

        • I think I read recently Federal prisons contain about a tenth of total prisoners. If 7,000 were from federal prisons, it’s likely that 70,000 were from state prisons, which wouldn’t be trivial

      • Not a proxy at all, but certainly correlated. Although the point is with a GED you have higher income (and could enroll in community college or even senior college if you don’t need remediation) than if you do not have a high school diploma or GED.

        Here are some variables that might explain the gap:
        age and cohort
        prison history (but not jail history since jails don’t do education)(prison past, prison current, no prison)
        addiction history
        region
        urban/rural
        gender

        @AJG Immigrants who want to go to college sometimes need the GED.

        I think you need to consider why people take the GED. Which is really to ask, first why did they not complete high school?, and then second, given that, why are they taking the GED?

        A few times a year they use the lecture halls where I teach to offer the exam and you never saw a more excited or nervous group of test takers, it’s always thrilling to pass by the line of people checking in.

        • Working in the hospitality industry – if you want a break you claim to be a smoker and pretend to smoke.

          Very soon you are addicted and you are a smoker and will get regular breaks as they will be _needed_ now.

          True story of someone I know who just succeeded in quitting (they think).

        • Working in mid-western academia, when you left the Department at midnight on a -25 C night, you were guaranteed to see a bunch of shivering Koreans on a smoking break among the snowdrifts near the doorway.

          Never figured what it was with Koreans. Every one I knew smoked like a chimney.

        • It would only be “prison past” and “no prison”, I think, since the NHIS data doesn’t include “institutionalized populations”.

  1. How do they define the groups: e.g. Is the cohort “undergraduate college degree” a subset of “with a high school diploma”? Or does the latter mean HS & no further degrees?

  2. Well, my first thought when seeing this kind of strong numerical conclusion is — where did the data come from and is it accurate.

    The data looks very suspect since it’s based on self-reported inputs from CDC telephone surveys, which likely have a large margin of error. How easy do you think it is to accurately assess how many Americans smoke… and accurately correlate that with various personal characteristics like GED status?

    “The CDC National Adult Tobacco Survey (NATS) NATS is a stratified, national, landline, and cell phone survey of non-institutionalized adults aged 18 years and older residing in the 50 states & D.C. It was developed to yield data representative and comparable at both national and state levels. The sample design also aims to provide national estimates for subgroups defined by gender, age, and race/ethnicity.”

  3. I find the statement very plausible. A High School diploma and a GED may signify similar levels of academic achievement, but there are other signaling effects of the diploma. HS graduates and GED holders are very different types of people. Since the inception of the All Volunteer Force the United States military has used the High School diploma as a screening mechanism to select individuals that can adapt to military service, conform in a hierarchical organizational structure, show the ability to complete a prescribed program (High School) and get along with others. Even after controlling for intelligence (AFQT score), GED holders had significantly higher attrition from service than traditional High School graduates.
    “The Services also value recruits with high school diplomas because research and experience show that they are more likely to complete an initial tour of duty. About 80% of high school graduate recruits complete their first 3 years of service, compared to only 50% of non-graduates. Completion rates for enlistees holding an alternative credential (e.g., General Education Development [GED] certificate) fall in between the high school diploma graduate and non-graduate rates.” Sellman

  4. This study may be relevant.

    “…we investigate whether GED recipients differ from other high school graduates in their smoking and obesity behaviors…. health returns to GED receipt are much smaller than the returns to high school completion….. More schooling is generally associated with less smoking, but …men and women GED recipients are the most likely to currently smoke, about 10 percentage points more likely than high school dropouts.

    Receipt of the GED appears to require relatively little investment in human capital, so large health returns to the GED seem unlikely. For example, while a typical year of high school involves over 400 hours in core curriculum classes, in 1989 the median examinee spent only 30 hours in preparation for the GED”

    Most damningly:

    “The pattern is consistent with evidence that while GED recipients have higher cognitive skills than dropouts they tend to be …‘wiseguys,’ who lack the abilities to think ahead, to persist in tasks, or to adapt to their environments.” ”

    http://www.nber.org/papers/w11990

  5. There’s a map here showing big state-to-state variation in GED rates, with the highest rates in Kentucky, where a lot of people smoke. On the other hand, there are also high rates in California, which counts against the geography explanation

    I’m not surprised that smoking would be high in that group. What is surprising is that it’s
    higher
    than *any other* subgroup they looked at (race, age, ethnicity, poverty, disability, health insurance). On the other hand, this is data from NHIS. The National Center for Health Statistics understands surveys and NHIS is one of their top products, so it’s hard to see them being off by, say, 20 percentage points and not even suspecting.

    Might be worth asking them.

      • I should also say that ADHD is thought to be a difficulty associated with “executive function” which is more or less the Psych term for “self control”. Also that stimulants typically help these kids a lot, and one of the reasons for early drug-taking behavior is usually to take stimulants such as caffeine, cocaine, etc. They also typically gravitate towards high excitement level activities like rock climbing, motocross, hang gliding, etc etc.

        The idea of studying whether these people have ADHD and to try to intervene appropriately with treatment for that issue while they’re still in school to improve their outcomes is a good one. I think there’s been a lot of poor targeting of ADHD treatment though and it’s caused a backlash.

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