The literacy skills of General Educational Development (GED) program graduates were compared to those of high school graduates and high school dropouts who did not pass the GED test. The sample of 1,012 young adults (ages 21 to 25 years) studied was obtained by selecting all Whites, African Americans, and Hispanics who were studied in the Young Adult Literacy Survey and who did not have any college education. Among the key findings of the study were the following: GED completers performed significantly better on literacy tests than did high school dropouts; although high school graduates performed slightly better on literacy tests than GED completers did, the actual differences were marginal; race/ethnicity was the most important demographic predictor of literacy performance, followed by mother's educational attainment; newspaper reading was a significant predictor of higher literacy performance; and females' performance in prose, document, and quantitative literacy was uniformly slightly higher than that of their male counterparts. It was concluded that participation in GED programs appears to help individuals gain the literacy skills valued by many employers and that it would, therefore, be premature to abandon GED programs. (MN)