While many other nations produce increasingly competent college graduates, the United States is struggling to get high school graduates. The problem of students dropping out of high school has reached “epidemic levels,” reportedabc News, with some school systems having a 50 percent dropout rate.

The problem stretches across the education system of the U.S. Schools coast to coast report that escalating numbers of students are ditching high school or failing to graduate. A recent Department of Education survey found that in the 100 largest public school districts in America, an astounding 31 percent of students that begin high school do not graduate. The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center has also put the number at nearly one in three. An estimated 2,500 students drop out of school every day. The crisis is at such levels not only in metropolitan areas, but in smaller cities and towns as well.

Soaring high school dropout statistics—in addition to having worrying repercussions for the individuals they represent, like higher rates of imprisonment, lower incomes and shorter life-spans—should red-flag the state of our young people and the education system.

Evidence suggests that more discipline and higher expectations would mean higher retention rates. A survey released earlier this year, The Silent Epidemic,stated that a large percentage of high school dropouts simply quit because they are bored and unchallenged. The survey said 69 percent of dropouts said they would have worked harder if it had been required of them. In the same study, 38 percent of students cited lack of discipline and too few rules as the reason they dropped out. That goes for both the school system and the families of such young people: A permissive environment tends to produce detached, underachieving youth.

If the evidence is right, we must consider our burgeoning numbers of dropouts to be, at least in part, casualties of our anti-authority, self-esteem-worshiping, just-be-you culture.

Whatever the case, the price for such high dropout rates is steep. Since high school dropouts account for the majority of incarcerations, more dropouts likely portends more crime. The problem is destined to increase as these high school dropouts go on to have their own children, who are growing up in homes that, on the whole, place less value on education, increasing the odds that they too will become dropouts. As the level of the American population’s education decreases, so too does the quality of our work force, our creative and critical thinking as a society, our leadership, and, ultimately, our ability to keep pace internationally.