What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun? . .
Or does it explode"

These lines are taken from the poem “Harlem” by African-American poet Langston Hughes. Written in 1951, the poem asks what happens when people cannot achieve their dreams because of racial prejudice. More recently, it inspired the title of a 1995 report on high school dropouts by the Educational Testing Service (ETS)—Dreams Deferred: High School Dropouts in the United States. The report uses some of the latest information from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) of the U.S. Department of Education to discuss the hundreds of thousands of young people who drop out of school each year.

The dreams of these young dropouts are said to be “deferred,” or postponed, because more and more jobs today require a high level of skill and...