Total Hours You’d Have to Work on Minimum Wage to Pay for a Year of College Tuition by State (4x more than 30 years ago)

Posted by toldyouanditoldyou

14 comments

  1. This graph is idiotic. If you make minimum wage you don’t pay full tuition. For a lot of colleges you won’t even pay a dime. The “sticker price” of college applies to people with money and foreign students; not minimum wage earning citizens.

  2. Yeah. College tuition has generally outpaced inflation and wage growth. A big part of that is because the federal government is willing to make a crapload of money available to 17-year-olds so they can pick the college “experience” they want instead of choosing a college based on price. That doesn’t impose any sort of “market discipline” on colleges. And, as a result, US colleges have really extraordinarily great experiences — fancy student unions and athletic facilities, access to all the latest and greatest equipment, athletics, dorm rooms that would have made their parents jealous when their parents were 18, etc…. And, colleges have also had a boom in the number of administrators they employ because, hey, why not? The students will be happy to pay for it.

    If the US government were to say “We’re not lending any money for colleges whose tuitions exceed $50,000 per year,” (or pick a number), you’d suddenly start seeing colleges reducing their tuitions to get under that ceiling. Yeah, it might mean building fewer racquetball courts or going from 71 degrees to 74 degrees in dorm A/Cs, but the end result would be much better for students.

    [Edit — changed “to colleges” to “for colleges”]

  3. In MN if your family AGI is 80k or less and you have not completed a 4 year degree you can get one for free.  

  5. Students need to pay the salaries of their professors and legions of administrators, who, at some schools, actually outnumber the students.

  7. Nobody works for minimum wage anymore.

    And instantiate minimum wage or federal? Because really no one works
    For federal minimum wage any longer since the states have higher mins.

  8. The data might be beautiful but the website inserts the smallest map they could find. Presentation could be better.

  9. Not saying there isn’t a problem with college costs but this graphic is terrible at about everything. It’s vague, the colors are confusing, the data is bad, the methodology is bad. The only thing well done is they showed their data which is why I can say for sure it’s bad.

    * **Minimum Wage** – They used the official state minimum wage, which is just a stupid political thing to do. Why not get actual average hourly wages for young part-time workers? The minimum wage in my state is $7.25/hour and my kid just got a job with zero experience, they weren’t even good at around the house chores, paying $14/hour from the first place they applied.
    * **Out of State Costs** – For some unknown reason they averaged in state and out of state. No idea how you justify that. At least they used the ratio of in/out state attendance to weight the average, but you’re just saying that kids choose to go to more expensive schools out of state. The more important data is what could they go to college for, not their college of choice. Might as well just use the tuition for Harvard or MIT since everyone wants to go there.
    * **In State Costs** – They used the sticker cost, which almost no one pays. I toured a community college with tuition costs of ~$4k and their own stats say that only 14% of students pay that. It’s not even income based as in my state if you have reasonable grades you get $4k for any in-state college and if you are a good student you get $10k and it’s not income limited.

  10. If you live in CT and go to a state community college, it’s a big fat zero.

  12. Is this before or after taxes? Because I have a feeling this is before. 

  14. I’ve seen so many financial data vizzes like these that are so eye opening 

Leave a Reply