In a recent letter (“Just pay your bills, college debtors”) Michael Mangers cited his own experience of graduating in 1982 to criticize government student loan payment pauses or forgiveness programs.
Mangers should consider that the average cost of a four-year degree at a public institution when he graduated was $3,139 — $9,868 in 2023 dollars — based on information from the Education Data Initiative. This is approximatelythe same cost of one year of tuition and fees at a public institution in 2020 ($9,349), with a four-year degree costing four times that ($37,396).
Mangers also cites unemployment rates and mortgage figures from the year he graduated. A more useful figure might be wages: the federal minimum wage in the latter half of 1982 was $2.30 per hour, or $7.23 in today’s dollars.
Although it is higher in many states including New Jersey, the federal minimum wage in 2023 remains at $7.25. Assuming a 40-hour work week, the four-year degree that the letter writer received in 1982 cost less than one year of wages for a minimum-wage worker at that time. Today, that same worker would need to work for 2 1/2 years to afford the same degree, assuming every single penny they earned went to tuition — with nothing left over for taxes, housing, food or transportation.
Mangers is fortunate to be of a generation where the cost of postsecondary education was well within reach of the average middle-class American. That is no longer the case, due to meteoric rises in tuition and...
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