A summer’s work at minimum wage used to easily pay for a whole year’s tuition. Not now.
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In the summer of 1976, just before my freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley, I worked as a groundskeeper at a neighborhood swim club. The regular minimum wage was $2.20 per hour, but the club was so cheap that I got paid the federal minimum wage for farmworkers. (I did a lot of weeding and watering.) So, I earned just $2 an hour.
But that was more than enough to pay my entire UCB tuition and fees. With one summer of full-time work, I or any real farmworker could make $960, about 50% more than the $637.50 for a whole academic year's tuition and fees at one of the best universities in the world.
Today, I teach at UCB, and I watch many of my students struggle with crushing debt. And no wonder. California just raised its minimum wage to $9, but at that pay, 12 weeks of summer work covers only a third of today's $12,972 tuition and fees.
Even if the movement for a $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers succeeds, a summer's work would cover slightly more than half of the tuition and fees for the 2014–2015 academic year.
One of the main reasons that state universities exist is to open up college education — and the opportunities that come with it — to economically disadvantaged students. So, how much college a summer minimum-wage job buys seems a reasonable measure of how accessible college education is. In different ways, the following charts show exactly that, from the 1970s to the present.
How long would you have to work at minimum wage to pay the average in-state tuition and required fees at a U.S. public university? In the early 1970s it was less than 300 hours, or about seven and a half weeks of full-time work. Now? More than 1,000 hours, or 25 weeks.
Sources: National Center for Education Statistics, Department of Education (college costs); Department of Labor (minimum wage). Note: This chart and all others in this post assume no wages are withheld for taxes, benefits, etc., and they also don’t account for financial aid or student loans. It uses the most generous federal minimum wage (for example, not the farm-labor wage in the 1970s) in effect as of July 1 for each year.
Jeremy Singer-Vine / BuzzFeed
