No more from after graduation?

March 18, 2009 12:17 PM

Why don't people graduate from school anymore?

It appears to me that people used to say "I graduated from high school", but that it is now more common to say "I graduated high school."

I'm curious: is it in fact true that using the "from" when describing graduation is less common now than, say, 5 or 10 years ago? (I don't know if this question is answerable.) If it is true, what reasons might drive the shift?

posted by betterton to Writing & Language (37 answers total)

I say from. Confirmation bias.
posted by sweetkid at 12:19 PM on March 18, 2009 [5 favorites]

I say from as well. "I graduated from High school" "I graduated from University". etc.
posted by gwenlister at 12:20 PM on March 18, 2009

"I graduated high school."

Anecdotally, no one I know says that.
posted by chrisamiller at 12:20 PM on March 18, 2009

I second confirmation bias—I'd think that this would depend on the context. I'm more likely to use from either in answering or asking a question ("When did you graduate from high school?" if I'm not just saying "When did you graduate?"). I'm less likely if simply stating a fact: I graduated high school in '97.
posted by klangklangston at 12:23 PM on March 18, 2009

Best answer: "I graduated from high school" -"I graduated high school": 39,100 Google hits
"I graduated high school" -"I graduated from high school": 32,200 Google hits

This suggests that people say both, with the from variant being slightly more common.
posted by The Tensor at 12:24 PM on March 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

Have you moved in the past five or ten years? Perhaps it's a regional variation.

FWIW, I, and most people I know, say from, but I have occasionally heard the sans-from version.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:27 PM on March 18, 2009

My Canadian co-worker uses similar constructions ("We need to be done this by suchandsuch date"). It's probably regional.
posted by 0xFCAF at 12:30 PM on March 18, 2009

Language is always changing and will always change. People are constantly adding words, deleting words, and changing the meaning of words. There is probably no reason other than it's one less word to say and the meaning of the sentence stays intact. In other words, it's a simplification.

Still, it's probable that you're hitting a pocket of people who use that particular phrasing when it is by no means in the main stream in the US.
posted by Alison at 12:31 PM on March 18, 2009

Neither. They were graduated by their high school (that is, the high school would be the one doing the graduating). At least that's what my high school biology teacher used to say.
posted by Jeff Howard at 12:31 PM on March 18, 2009

My mom insists on using the even older construction: "When I was graduated from UCLA..."

I'm from California and I use the from-less construction colloquially, sometimes.
posted by Kirklander at 12:32 PM on March 18, 2009

...by no means in the main stream in the US.

I'm going to take that back. Still, I stand by my assertion that it's a simplification, which is par for the course as a language ages. It's the reason we thankfully no longer have 3 different past tenses in English.
posted by Alison at 12:36 PM on March 18, 2009

I second the regional hypothesis. I'm from CA, but now live in the midwest. I hear people say "graduate high school" all the time. They also say "Do you want to come with?" I just think it's a regional thing.

The google search really sums it up: Since the existence of the internets, both have been said online about an equal number of times. Nice job The Tensor.
posted by crapples at 12:39 PM on March 18, 2009

Funny, I remember reading a fairly old account by a young graduate of an Ivy League school who was being proposed for a membership in some exclusive men's club, and was startled half out of his wits when "I was graduated from..." caused one of the gruffer older members to erupt from his chair with hand extended in his eagerness to congratulate a young man who knew the proper usage.
posted by jamjam at 12:43 PM on March 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

Anecdotal: the only people that drop the 'from' around these parts are idiots.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:48 PM on March 18, 2009

I've heard it both ways, as well as jamjam's formal version.
posted by rokusan at 12:50 PM on March 18, 2009

Best answer: "I graduated high school" 348k
"I graduated from high school" 292k
"I graduated college" 159k
"I graduated from college" 320k
posted by box at 12:51 PM on March 18, 2009

I'd also say it's a regional thing -- as I've never heard anyone not use "graduate from" -- but I'm from the Midwest and have always lived here, so apparently my experience is different from others.

(As for the use of the phrase "Do you want to come with?", doing so in my presence means I will (a) hug you if you are my mother or (b) mock you if you are not.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:54 PM on March 18, 2009

I have heard "graduated high school" more and more in the last few years. I can't say it is a regional thing, because I have seen it in print as well.

However, I say "graduated from". I think "graduated ___" sounds weird.
posted by DrGirlfriend at 12:56 PM on March 18, 2009

Best answer: When I was working for newspapers 20 years ago, the style guide insisted up "graduated from" but had dropped the older "was graduated from". Just "graduated" would have been edited to add the "from". People were obviously saying and writing it then (or there would be no need to mention it in the style guide) but just "graduated" sounded a little less literate to most ears. For that reason, I still never drop it.

For me, it's also a question of subject, of who's acting on whom. I didn't do anything to my high school worth mentioning, certainly not "graduate" it. I did receive a notice of graduation from my high school, though. I was graduated from it, not it from me. So I don't put "graduated high school" in printed form, and I notice it with dismay in written form. I recognize that this is a changing usage and it's basically arbitrary for me to use "I graduated from" but not "I was graduated from," but there you have my two cents on the matter.
posted by Miko at 1:06 PM on March 18, 2009

datapoint of N=1: I tend to only use the "from" whith proper nouns. I say I graduated high school/graduated college, but I'll say that I graduated from Surburban Township High School or graduated from University of Large Midwestern State
I grew up in southeast Michigan. And am apparently an idiot.
posted by twoporedomain at 1:08 PM on March 18, 2009

It's a regional variation in the US, and has been common since the 1920s at least.

Either you moved, or you started reading/watching/listening to media that was staffed by more people in whose regional dialect this features, or you noticed it once and then started noticing all the other instances of it.

I recognize that this is a changing usage

I don't think it is, actually--I think it's just that national newspapers/magazines/news broadcasts are more tolerant of regional variants than they were even 20 years ago. I've certainly seen "she graduated high school" in fiction from the early 20th century.

The regional variant I always find confusing is "this needs stapled" (rather than the more common "this needs to be stapled").
posted by Sidhedevil at 1:19 PM on March 18, 2009

People were obviously saying and writing it then ... but just "graduated" sounded a little less literate to most ears. For that reason, I still never drop it.

I think box's statistics above make a good point about received, "proper" usage of the phrase.
posted by Johnny Assay at 1:19 PM on March 18, 2009

I myself have used it without "from," and I don't think I'm an idiot or illiterate or any of the aspersions people are casting. For instance, if I'm telling someone my life story, I'll typically say, "Well, I graduated law school in 2007, then I moved to Austin," etc. It doesn't really sound that weird in context; in fact, it might seem slightly stuffy to say, "I graduated from law school in 2007."

I think what's going on in this thread is that the OP's question is prompting people to say it to themselves in isolation, completely out of context. When you do that, it seems weird to leave out "from." In spoken conversation, though, it's just a way to be breezy and drop a needless syllable.

As for your impression that this has become more common in just the last 5 or 10 years, this seems not just impossible to verify (as you admit), but pretty implausible. It's like how when you learn a new word, you always hear/read it somewhere else in the next 24 hours. You could say, "Wow, people have suddenly started using this word all the time," but don't you think it's more likely that you've suddenly started noticing it?
posted by Jaltcoh at 1:38 PM on March 18, 2009

My Canadian co-worker uses similar constructions ("We need to be done this by suchandsuch date").

Using "be" instead of "have" for past-tense forms of "do"/"finish" (I'm pretty sure that's what it is, rather than just dropping "with") is a particularly Canadian thing, but I think dropping "from" after "graduate" is common in the U.S.
posted by oaf at 1:49 PM on March 18, 2009

Best answer:

The use of graduate most likely to be criticized these days is a new transitive sense meaning "to graduate from"... This use of graduate without from has been cited as an error by usage commentators dating back to Evans 1957. It occurs frequently in speech, but its appearance in edited prose is still relatively uncommon.

—Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, which goes on to quote examples from Harper's in 1972, and the New York Times Book Review in 1975.
posted by grouse at 1:50 PM on March 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

Best answer: This is old. Here's an example from 1876.
posted by Kattullus at 2:31 PM on March 18, 2009

For me, it's also a question of subject, of who's acting on whom.

It's true that "Harvard graduated Mike1024" and "Mike1024 graduated Harvard" having either the same or reversed meanings could lead to confusion. That said, the meanings are perfectly cromulent when considering the sentence in context.
posted by Mike1024 at 3:09 PM on March 18, 2009

Response by poster: It probably is at least partially confirmation bias. I noticed it first when I heard the version without the "from" on NPR and thought it sounded funny. Now that I've noticed, it seems to be everywhere.

box: I like your statistics. If google-majority rules, people "graduate high school" but then "graduate from college."

From different answers, it does seem that it has become more common: the examples from grouse and Miko suggest the missing from was at some times considered bad, but the google stats say the missing from is quite common.

Thanks for the info!
posted by betterton at 3:33 PM on March 18, 2009

Response by poster: I marked as best answers those that had supporting evidence - usage examples, style guides, and statistics - because I think those come closest to getting at whether or not my observation is real or confirmation bias.

The anecdotal answers are helpful too.
posted by betterton at 3:38 PM on March 18, 2009

I used it on a grad school application by accident, and got in.
posted by Kirklander at 4:17 PM on March 18, 2009

I never use from. I'm from Philly. In college, people used to complain about the people from Philly who did this.
posted by melodykramer at 4:42 PM on March 18, 2009

My sense of this was that people draw an analogy between the phrase in question and "completed high school", which never uses "from". You complete (or finish) high school by graduating, hence the connection.

Of course, it is virtually impossible to prove that this is what really goes on in this case, but it is plausible, I think.
posted by kosmonaut at 4:50 PM on March 18, 2009

This is simply a case of our English language dumbing down over time, and as the Philly reference above shows, it tends to begin via regional dialects. Have you noticed how often people also drop the "to be" when speaking in the future tense? Rather than saying "this needs to be done" they say "this needs done."

............fingernails, meet chalk board.
posted by 2oh1 at 8:32 PM on March 18, 2009

Have you noticed how often people also drop the "to be" when speaking in the future tense?

Previously.
posted by grouse at 8:44 PM on March 18, 2009

This is simply a case of our English language dumbing down over time

Nah. The language is always, always changing. It's clear that graduate has simplified in meaning, from a school graduating a student, to a student graduating from a school, to a student just graduating school. The distinction is interesting but in a hundred years nobody will remember saying it the other way, just as hardly anybody now remembers when it was the first way.

Or maybe the concept of graduation itself will go away. Or high school. We'll all be continually NCLB-PSATted by online neural networks. At which point the funny 20th century concept of graduation will be itself passè.
posted by dhartung at 11:42 PM on March 18, 2009

My mom also insists that it's "was graduated from," but this sounds too old-fashioned to me, and it's the sort of thing where 1% of people will be filled with grammarian glee but the other 99% will just think you're weird. I think I would be most likely to say "graduated from" but I find that the whole thing can be avoided by saying "I am a graduate of BlahBlah College."
posted by naoko at 2:10 PM on March 21, 2009

Languages change. American English change way too fast for the past few decades.
posted by sanskrtam at 8:53 PM on November 5, 2009