Friday, January 30, 2009

Drop out rates and minimum wage

http://reportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/summary.aspx?year=2007-08

The argument doesn't seem to work.
Compare 2000 to today.
The numbers should be increasing with wages, but they are dropping.

7 comments:

Jonathan said...

Maybe now that minimum wage is up, people have more hope, so they think they can do even better if they stay in school. Maybe they are able to work after school and be able to support their families and not be forced to drop out.

steve said...

I’m a little skeptical of the connection between the minimum wage and dropout rates. As they say in psychology, correlation does not prove causation.
-Matthew

Anonymous said...

publius: I was totally going to post that! Today in English I was thinking that very same thing!

Unknown said...

I also hope that the increased minimum wage will help the living conditions of the poor and give them hope for the future. This might just be the push that people need to go back to school get better training and improve their jobs and life. The most important thing is education and I think most people forget that. Good education gets you ahead and life and increases mobility between classes.

Kirsten said...

I would have to disagree. I see a clear connection between the two. I personally know of countless people who graduated from high school, but did not go off to college during the fall quarter following graduation in order to work and "make more money". In the end, a majority of those high school graduates ended up getting small raises making it harder and harder to want to quit their job to pay for college. Why spend money when you can make money? With minimum wage so high, I could see plenty of kids dropping out of high school to make that whole eight bucks an hour. This could just be because I grew up in Wapato =] Who knows.

Juan Carlos Farias102 said...

minimum will make me feel like crap now because now I'm stuck at the same pay i was year when minimum actually increased but not my pay. And i bet everything else will go up as well.

scott said...

i dissagre I still believe tha a raise in minimum wage is all around a bad thing. all it does is cause inflation and bring the hard working and educated middle calss into a lower bracket. if your gonna hit something aim for the top.