More than a quarter of California youngsters attending seventh grade classes in 2001-02 failed to graduate from high school in 2007, and in one major community dropouts outnumbered graduates, according to a new statistical study by the California Dropout Research Project, .. The state's 480,595 seventh-graders had shrunken to 356,641 high school graduates, the UCSB researchers found. .. The project asserts that California will see $24.2 billion in economic losses, both lower wages and higher government and crime costs, from that one class's dropouts and will also experience some 28,000 more violent crimes.