The Alliance for Excellent Education (AEE) reports that over the course of his or her lifetime, a high school dropout earns, on average, about $260,000 less than a high-school graduate. The cost actually extends far beyond the dropouts themselves. Dropouts from the class of 2007 alone will cost the nation nearly $329 billion in lost wages, taxes, and productivity over their lifetimes. AEE also notes that if dropouts from the Class of 2006 had graduated, the nation could have saved more than $17 billion in Medicaid and expenditures for uninsured health care, over the course of those young people's lifetimes.