Maimouna Issoufou Kapran

TEEN PREGNANCY AND

CONTINUING EDUCATION

Introduction

Teen pregnancy is a major issue in the society and with it, come several consequences such as

teens living alone below poverty lines, having to interrupt their education, etc. According to the

U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), there were 24.2 births for every 1,000

adolescent females ages 15-19, or 249,078 babies born to females in this age group in 2014 and

nearly 89 percent of these births occurred outside of marriage. The Center for Disease Control and

Prevention (CDC) put forth that “the U.S. teen pregnancy rate is substantially higher than in other

western industrialized nations”. The purpose of this recommendation report is to determine a

theoretical rate of pregnant teens in Albuquerque that interrupted their education and suggest

solutions to decrease this rate.

Figure 1: Teenage

birth rate 15-19

years old by state,

2014

Data from U.S.

Department of

Health & Human

Services

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Maimouna Issoufou Kapran

Methodology

I was hired by a division of the CDC called Adolescent Reproductive Health to establish an

approximate of the rate of pregnancy among UNM students and determine the percentage of those

who dropped out of school and/or interrupted their educational path, then make good

recommendation the solve the problem. To do so, my plan is to conduct a survey on campus and

in a grocery store and, using random sampling at the chosen location, I will ask students questions

related to teen pregnancy. Using the results obtained from this survey, I will draw conclusions

about how “important the problem” is in the community and then I will be able to draw

recommendations on how to best deal with it.

1. Did you or anyone of your entourage had a baby between ages 15 and 19?

2. What is the Race/Ethnicity of the mother?

3. Did the mother dropped out of school?

4. If yes, did the mother went back to school?

I chose to administer these survey questions in two different locations for two reasons. First, no

one knows more teens than teens themselves. By surveying the student population, my results will

be more precise. Second, I will survey customers in a grocery store because it is a public place that

everyone frequents. It will allow me to have results that are precise yet accurate to the whole

community being studied.

Results

I conducted the survey as described in my methodology section and summarized the results in the

table below. I am also providing a few examples of the answers I got while surveying at the

different locations I chose.

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Maimouna Issoufou Kapran

First survey: I went to the SUB and randomly asked 20 students the questions stated above, then I

made a table and reported the results obtained.

Second survey: I went to Smith’s grocery store and randomly asked 30 customers about their

experience with teen pregnancies. Then I reported the results in the same table as the first survey.

Finally, I combined both results obtained from different locations and came up with the estimated

percentage of teenagers that dropped out of school and did not go back to school.

Extract of Survey

Participant #3 (SUB): this participant said that her sister got pregnant when she was sixteen.

She dropped out of school and today she is about 25 years old, she has 2 babies and she

did not come back to school.

Participant #17 (SUB): this participant said that she got pregnant last year and she did not

drop out of school because she was due in June (she gave birth May 21st ), and since she

recovered well, she decided to pursue her education and came back to university while her

mom took care of her child when she was busy.

Participant #26 (Smith’s): this participant said that she gave birth to her first baby when

she was 18. She is a 46 years old stay-at-home mom and her husband mostly provides for

the family even though she sometimes has a little job on the side. She said that she does

not feel the need to go back to school today, even though she regrets not having a degree

and a good job.

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Maimouna Issoufou Kapran

Participant #39 (Smith’s): this participant is a 28-year-old mom of 2 children. She first had

a baby when she was 19 and eventually dropped out of college. She came back to pursue

her studies at Central New Mexico Community College just 1 year ago.

Questions UNM Smith’s

YES NO YES NO
Did you or anyone of your 7/20 13/20 9/30 21/30
entourage had a baby between
ages 15 and 19?

Did the mother dropped out of 6/7 1/7 9/9 0/9

school?

If yes, did the mother went back 3/6 3/6 2/9 7/9
to school?

What is the Race/Ethnicity of the Hispanic: 3 N/A Hispanic:6 N/A

mother? Black:1 Black:2
Caucasian: 2 Caucasian:1
Percentage of student that
interrupted their studies for an
50% 78%
undetermined length
Total estimate
64%
Figure 2: Results of Survey

From this survey, I also got that the reason for dropping out that comes up the most is that the

mother usually have no choice but to stay home and take care of the baby.

The second reason that comes up the most is the financial problem because of the charges that

comes with taking care of a child.

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Maimouna Issoufou Kapran

Thus, I organized the reasons for dropping out and constructed a pie chart (see below).

Reasons for dropping out

Have to stay home to take care of the baby Financial issues It was the right thing to do Afraid of the opnions

As part of the process to further examine the results I obtained, I did some research about pregnant

teens that dropout of school and contrast the results. According to CDC, only about 50% of teen

mothers receive a high school diploma by 22 years of age.

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Maimouna Issoufou Kapran

Figure 3: The top

reasons students

drop out of high

school

Data from Business

Insider

Figure 4: Teen

Pregnancy Affects

Graduation Rates

Data from Income

Inequality

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Maimouna Issoufou Kapran

Discussion of Results

After presenting the results I obtained from research and survey in the section above, I am now

going to provide an analysis of these results. From the survey conducted at UNM, the theoretical

percentage of pregnant teens would be 35%. More importantly, the percentage of pregnant teens

that dropped out of school is 86% and the percentage of teen moms that came back to pursue their

education is 50%. These results show that more than eighty percent of the teenagers that got

pregnant dropped out of school and among these students, half of them, deliberately or not, chose

to interrupt their education and have not return yet.

From the survey conducted at Smith’s, I determined that the theoretical percentage of pregnant

teens would be 30%. Moreover, the percentage of pregnant teenagers that dropped out of school

is 100% for this survey group and the percentage of those who did not come back to school is

approximately 78%. It means that more than half of the teenagers interrupted their studies and did

not come back to school.

I did the average from both survey results to have an estimate of Albuquerque’s percentage of

student that interrupt their studies and found out that it is approximately 64%. Knowing that

Albuquerque’s population was 559,277 in 2016, that would make an estimation of 4,832 female

that interrupted her studies after being pregnant. Even though that is just an estimation if 3% of

the female population got pregnant (according to Figure 1), the numbers are still huge, and the

problem needs to be solved.

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Maimouna Issoufou Kapran

Conclusion with the recommendations

Subsequently, the results of this research are as follow: most of teenagers that got pregnant dropped

out of school and it is understandable knowing their situation. They face different problems each

depending on their situations which determine if they will be able to continue their education or

not. However, the problem resides in the fact that an important number of these teenagers never

come back to school to pursue their education, with a higher trend when they dropped in high

school than when they drop from college.

I thereby submit a course of action to help resolve this problem:

Provide teen moms with funds to go to school after giving birth because most of them don’t

do so because of the lack of money to take care of their child and pay tuition.

Provide child care centers on campus for teen moms’ children because if they cannot afford

babysitters and do not have anyone to look over their children, they will not be able to

attend classes.

Create more awareness programs to inform teenagers of importance of education, and more

importantly, inform teen moms of the importance of continuing their education.

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Maimouna Issoufou Kapran

Sources

Business insider

http://www.businessinsider.com/most-common-reasons-students-drop-out-of-high-school-

2015-10

Center for Control of Disease and Prevention(CDC)

https://www.cdc.gov/teenpregnancy/about/index.htm

Income Inequality

https://incomeinequality.wikispaces.com/Impact+on+families

U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)

https://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-development/reproductive-health-and-teen-

pregnancy/teen-pregnancy-and-childbearing/trends/index.html