There has been lots of talk about raising the minimum wage to $15. I have done a number of calculations about this - not to prove or disprove any one side, but just to show the math behind the numbers. This will be a multi-part series with the end-goal of education - There will be math and math always evokes emotion. I'm curious what questions come up. Please let me know .
My son is about to graduate college. He is at a two-year private trade school. I knew the cost of secondary education had gone up since I last attended, but it wasn't until I did the math that I realized how much it went up. What baffled me was the rate that it went up when compared to the federal minimum wage. Here is a chart of what I mean:
Let me interpret some of this for you. The first three columns are data sets - year, the federal minimum wage, and the average cost of a 4-year public college per year. I used values published by USA Today, but also found comparable numbers on other sites.
That fourth column is the eye-opening one for me. That is how many hours a student would have to work to pay off a yearly tuition bill. It is then broken into that student working either 40 or 50 weeks of the year.
What this means: Back in 1980 a college student would have had to work 20 hours per week for 40 weeks to pay off their college tuition bill. By 1990 it was 33 hours. By the year 2000 it was 41 hours. Today it is 77 hours.... yes... a student would have to work 77 hours PER WEEK for 40 weeks, or 62 hours PER WEEK for 50 weeks, to pay off their college tuition that year. This would be on top of going to college classes, completing homework and labs, and other educational duties.
What happens if we increase minimum wage to $15 per hour? The numbers of hours needed to work drops to 30 hours per week if the student works 50 weeks a year, putting us back to Generation X levels of the mid-1990s, but nowhere near the numbers for the Baby Boomer years. For that to happen, minimum wage would have to be around $25 per hour.
It is physically impossible for college-aged students to pay for tuition with just "a good ole hard work ethic." There are not enough hours in a year to do it. This is a reason student loan debt is as high as it is. Right now citizens in the US have $1,570,000,000,000 (that's trillion) in student loan debt, about $35,000 per borrower. And remember, this doesn't include anything other than tuition: books, meals, dorms, other fees - none of those are included in these calculations.
I'm not saying raising the minimum wage would solve any of these problems - but clearly this is not a sustainable model for higher education in the country.
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