The purpose of this study is to describe the high school dropout with regard to his or her educational, vocational, and sociological characteristics. Data were collected from a stratified sample of 97 public high schools having 9,699 tenth-grade pupils. Two years later a follow-up was made to determine which pupils had completed high school. Dropouts were characterized by: (1) poor achievement in school, (2) having no plans for post-high school education, (3) low academic aptitude, (4) having a father who is not a high school graduate and who holds a job requiring little skill or training, (5) enrollment in a non-academic curriculum, and (6) living in the South or in a large city.