What It Means When Your Teen Earns Both a GED and a High School Diploma: A Guidance Counselor’s Advice
It’s 3pm on a Tuesday, and I’m sitting at my desk in the windowless first-floor office next to the high school cafeteria, so the smell of leftover pepperoni pizza still hangs in the air. My cold coffee sits in a chipped Kentucky Wildcats mug, and across from me, 17-year-old Mia and her mom sit in the chair with the ripped arm where a student carved their initials last year. Mom pushes a copy of Mia’s GED scores across my desk, her brow furrowed. “We just got this in the mail, and I can’t stop wondering: why do we need both? If she’s graduating with her high school diploma next week, didn’t we waste four months of her time on this?”
Mia picks at a loose thread on her hoodie and doesn’t look up. I already know the backstory: sophomore year, she started having crippling panic attacks before first period, and ended up missing 11 weeks of second semester junior year. She fell behind on two half-credit electives required for graduation, and our district’s policy says if you don’t have all credits by May 1, you can’t walk with your class. Her options were: go to night school for credit recovery, finish in June, and walk with next year’s class, or work on the GED for an hour after school four days a week, get it done by April, and keep chipping away at her electives. If the electives fell through, she’d still have the GED. If they didn’t, she’d have both. It was Mia’s call, and she picked the second option.
“I didn’t want to not walk with Lila,” Mia says, finally looking up. “We’ve been best friends since third grade. And every time I thought about maybe not finishing the electives in time, I’d panic so bad I couldn’t get out of bed. Knowing I had the GED waiting made that stop.”
This is the question I get at least twice a year now, that most parenting resources don’t talk about. No one plans to get both a GED and a high school diploma. It’s not the path we see on graduation announcements or college recruiting brochures. But for kids whose high school careers got knocked off course by mental health challenges, chronic illness, family moves, needing to work full time to help pay rent, or any number of ordinary messy life things, it’s a practical middle ground most people don’t even know exists.
Two years ago, I had a student named Javi whose family moved here from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, and all his high school transcripts got lost in the evacuation. He was 17, starting junior year, and we could only confirm two of his previous credits. He got a job stocking shelves at the local grocery store to help his mom pay rent, so he couldn’t stay after school every day for extra credits. He started working on his GED so he could apply to the community college welding program as soon as he turned 18, and kept taking one credit a semester toward his high school diploma. He finished the diploma last spring, two years after he got his GED, and he still has both hanging on the wall of his apartment. He told me when he got hired for his current pipe fitting job, the manager barely glanced at them – he just asked to see Javi’s welding certification. But Javi said it feels good to have both. It doesn’t hurt to have two pieces of paper that say you finished what you started.
The biggest myth I have to dismantle for parents is that having both makes your high school diploma less valid. That’s just not true. The GED is a test that proves you meet high school-level academic standards, and the diploma proves you showed up and completed four years of coursework. For kids who need a safety net, having both is just proof you planned ahead, not that you did something wrong.
I have a few concrete things I tell parents who walk into my office with this question. First, check your state and district rules before you decide. Some states don’t allow public schools to issue a diploma to a student who already earned a GED, but most do now, especially if you started working toward the diploma before you finished the GED. If you’re confused, just call your guidance counselor and ask straight out – don’t assume it’s off the table. Second, watch how you talk about the GED around your kid. Instead of saying “if you fail the diploma, at least you have this,” try saying “this gives you more options to stay on track for what you want.” I’ve seen that small shift in language take a huge weight off a kid’s shoulders. Third, when you fill out applications for college, trade school, or jobs, list both. You don’t have to hide the GED. If there’s a clear reason you earned both (missed school for illness, lost transcripts, etc.), just add a one-sentence note in the additional information section explaining it. That’s it. I’ve never had a kid rejected from a program for having both, in 12 years of doing this job.
By the end of our meeting, Mia’s mom relaxed a little. She said she just didn’t want Mia to get her application thrown out for a mistake they made. I told her this wasn’t a mistake – it was a choice Mia made to take care of her mental health and stay on track for what she wanted. They left to go pick up Mia’s graduation cap and gown, and I tossed a half-eaten granola bar that had been sitting on my file cabinet for three days into the trash.
Last Friday, I saw Mia at graduation. She was standing in the line before the ceremony, holding her diploma cover and a small framed copy of her GED certificate, leaning against Lila. She saw me, waved, and held up the frame to show me. She’s applying to the community college dental hygiene program this fall, and we won’t know if she gets in for another couple months. No one can promise everything will work out perfectly. But what I can tell parents is this: getting both isn’t a failure of planning, or a waste of time. It’s just one more way a kid can get to where they want to go, one messy, practical step at a time.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What It Means When Your Teen Earns Both a GED and a High School Diploma: A Guidance Counselor’s Advice