The high school diploma is a symbolic, if not traditional, gesture of our maturity into adulthood.
Behind all of the pomp and circumstance, the high school diploma is today less an achievement than it is a stepping stone towards college or technical training.
The high school diploma was in an earlier time a symbol of success, an entrance into middle-class jobs and pay. However, today a high school diploma is often a basic requirement for serious employment.
There are several causes of this phenomenon. Firstly, more jobs in our postindustrial society require skills and knowledge that are only provided with an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.
Many jobs in manufacturing often did not require a high school diploma, and with increased  outsourcing to foreign countries overseas, more graduates and students are pushed towards college.
This destroys what was a common source of easy employment after high school, as people who would have been content working in a factory for a decent wage found themselves needing a college education to make ends meet.
Secondly, there is no way for an employer to determine how much effort a student has put into his or her high school diploma. A student could take all the Advanced Placement courses, participate in sports, and volunteer their spare time during their four years in high school. Likewise, a student could completely blow off their education and scrape by through senior year.
Both students receive the exact same piece of paper.
The problem is further compounded by the No Child Left Behind Act, which directly ties schools’ funding to their students’ performance on standardized tests and graduation rates.
Schools that failed to produce a certain percentage of graduates or test poorly would see their funding cut as an incentive to get them to improve their standards.
However, many schools restructured their curriculums around the tests, instead of actual coursework,  to ensure more students pass and graduate.
Because of this standardization schools are incentivized to lower their standards in exchange for funding, and with this many graduates who do not deserve a diploma are still given a diploma. Thus, to ensure the quality of their workforce, many employers now require some college as proof that employees are ready for employment.
The sheer number of graduates creates inflation in the jobs market, because there are so many people with diplomas, the value of one intrinsically declines. The state of California, besides offering regular high school, offers a General Equivalency Degree (GED) program that increases the number of students with diplomas.
The high school diploma still has some value, it is an important and required stepping stone towards college, and diplomas are also often a validation of maturity and accomplishment. Graduates with diplomas or GEDs make more money than their dropout counterparts, and overall have a higher employment rate than those without a diploma.

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