The minimum wage and the value of a college education

If the minimum wage rises to $15 and hour and humanities and social science graduates of expensive private colleges spend $300,000 to graduate into a job paying, in effect, $18 an hour, how long will parents agree to that cost for four years with so little progression in life, career or income? Will they instead say to their child, "Take this $300,000, invest it, and get a job that does not require a college education."

More than thirty years ago, I recall a trip to Toledo, Ohio, to interview for a dean's position. One lament I heard was that college was traditionally not of interest to many as the wages of a 'good factory job' were more than competitive with those of many of the options available to college graduates.

About ten years ago, in Billings, Montana, I heard how student recruitment was compounded by the options to drive tanker trucks in the nearby old fields, earning $75,000 a year, much more than just about any graduate of a Montana university.

About thirty years ago, when I asked an MBA class what they would consider to be a decent wage after completion of their degrees, there was some agreement around salaries around $35,000. Inflation-indexed and considering cost of living in Arkansas, maybe that worked for them, but a graduate degree seemed like a bad investment, when long-haul truck drivers made more than that, without the cost in time or money of a graduate degree, even in business.

At that same university -- Central Arkansas -- I also learned that the cost of auto insurance for a college-aged student was about the same as a year of in-state tuition at UCA. New students at the university would often work a full time job to pay the insurance for the truck they received at graduation when, without the truck they'd not have to work just to pay the insurance. Or they could work to earn their tuition. Guess which route many chose...

The point is that what we know from basic economics is that resources are limited and trade-offs are part of life. What a good education should teach a person is to make the right decisions as to the best tradeoffs, including deferring some gratification for much better rewards down the road, or developing and keeping a frugal lifestyle, or turning down the easy, appealing route to take on the more challenging route towards success, or simply developing a more wholistic sense of what 'success' actually means.

Too often, lives and career choices seem to be divided between the path to poverty or the road to riches, when the more meaningful live is somewhere in between. As I always told all of my students: Find a task or skill you do well. Find a task or job you enjoy doing. And find a job or career that easy the bills. Do all three and you'll be fine.And, most of all, appreciate that in the United States -- at least until now -- you have the privilege of being able to pursue and achieve all three. Not necessarily riches. And not necessarily a lavish lifestyle. It's a balance of quantity and quality of life, of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, of personal responsibility and personal satisfaction, of a meaningful and a meaningless life. And of leaving the world a better place than you found it. Now that's joy....