It shouldn’t surprise anyone that GEDs Aren’t Worth the Paper They’re Printed On:
Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman and colleague Stephen Cameron have found GED holders to be “statistically indistinguishable” from high school dropouts: they’re not significantly more likely to land a job or to have higher hourly wages. Other studies find that GED holders do slightly better than dropouts but still lousy compared with regular high school grads — who themselves, in today’s knowledge-based economy, earn only 54 percent of what college grads make, according to 1999 Bureau of Labor Statistics figures.
A great quote from Lois Quinn, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, who has written a critical history of the GED:
It’s the Wizard of Oz; they give you a piece of paper.