Research into why students drop out of school has focused primarily on demographic characteristics like race and family income. After interviewing college students who had dropped out of high school, the authors argue that, regardless of background, what happens to students in school influences whether they will stay and graduate. I just kind of got pushed through the system. I was all behind in my academics. They didn't care; they just sit you inside the class. They never failed me. I never missed school. I wasn't a troublemaker. And it was horrible. There wasn't one person in school that really took an interest--one adult that could see that there was something there. Maybe it was because I was so quiet. I don't know; I just don't feel that they were there for me. I don't think anybody was. I have always felt that teachers have a lot of power to really help or really tear down a person. As a student you really look up to your teachers, especially a kid like me that didn't have much support in life. A teacher's words are tremendously powerful. THESE comments come from college students--successful college students. But as is evident from what they say, they weren't always successful. In fact, each dropped out of high school and later earned the General Education Development (GED) certificate, the high school equivalency diploma, before entering college. We have learned about their high school experiences as a result of the GED Scholars Initiative at Kent State University. We believe their stories may provoke thought among those involved in secondary education. The American Council on Education reports that more than 945,000 U.S. adults took the GED test in 2001, an increase of nearly 32% from 2000. (1) Those who pass the tests (approximately 70%) outperform at least 40% of the high school seniors on whom the tests were normed. Moreover, the number of GED candidates who plan to pursue higher education after completing the test battery increased by almost 20 percentage points over a 13-year period (from 47.5% in 1988 to 65.5% in 2001). Yet very little is currently known about the needs of GED graduates who attend universities. This lack of information may contribute to their limited success, so providing assistance for GED graduates who are motivated to pursue a college education seems an important task. For the past decade, the Ohio Literacy Resource Center (OLRC) at Kent State University has supported adult literacy programs throughout Ohio and beyond. In June 2002, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the OLRC began the GED Scholars Initiative, a project whose overall goals are to support GED graduates in higher education, to develop a replicable support model, and to gain a better understanding of who GED graduates are and how to support them in college. In other words, we hope to construct portraits of typical undergraduates coming from a GED background and to develop programs and systems of support for them. To assist in achieving these goals, we conducted individual interviews and focus group discussions with 25 current university students who held GEDs. As part of these conversations, we asked the students to recount their educational experiences. Then we analyzed the data according to widely accepted procedures for qualitative research. Of course, a group of former dropouts might not give completely unbiased views of their years in high school. We are aware of that, but we present a summary of our findings here in the hope that secondary educators will be able to learn something from what these GED Scholars have to say. A WAKE-UP CALL FOR HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATORS The central theme of this article is that specific experiences, policies, and individuals in high schools have a profound impact on students' decisions to leave high school. Historically, reports on high school dropout rates cite demographic factors, including ethnicity, family income, and age, as primary contributors to noncompletion. …