GED PROGRAM DISPLAYS ITS WORTH OVER 50 YEARS

The General Educational Development test, commonly referred to as the GED test, has for the past 50 years given approximately 10 million people who lack a high school education a second chance to increase their literacy skills and enhance their potential in the work place.

Many businesses in the area realize how helpful the program can be to their employees, so much so that they encourage workers who lack high school diplomas to participate in classes offered by the Cape Girardeau Area Vocational-Technical School that prepare GED participants for the test.

Some businesses even invite the school's GED instructors into their plants to offer the free instruction, making it easier for those who want to further their educational skills to do so. For those people, the opportunity to obtain a GED certificate is within immediate reach; all that is required is the desire to improve themselves.

Those who have completed the GED program readily attest to how it has improved their lives. Life can be difficult without at least a high school degree, and those who have worked to receive a high-school equivalency certificate say it not only has improved their skills but has made them generally feel better about themselves.

The judicial and prison systems in Missouri understand the importance of education as part of the rehabilitation process of those who have gone astray. Judges often require that participation in the GED program be a condition of a person's probation, and state prisoners have every opportunity to participate in the program.

For some, obtaining a general education certificate has become the springboard to higher education. Commendably, Southeast Missouri State University, which has administered the test locally for the past 20 years, offers a scholarship to anyone who scores at least 300 of the 400 possible points on the GED test. The scholarship covers incidental fees for one semester, and is renewable to recipients who maintains a 3.5 grade-point average and are enrolled in at least 12 credit hours.

The university gives approximately 1,000 GED tests per year; nationwide, more than 700,000 people take the test annually. In the United States, one in 20 college students has a GED instead of a high school diploma.

Those numbers alone speak for the success of the program during its first half century of existence. The program has improved the lives of many people during that time and will continue to do so for many years for those who realize the importance of a high school degree.