25% of Wharton students think the average American worker makes over $100k a year

"I asked Wharton students what they thought the average American worker makes per year and 25% of them thought it was over six figures. One of them thought it was $800k. Really not sure what to make of this (The real number is $45k)" - Nina Strohminger, professor of legal studies & business ethics at Wharton

https://twitter.com/NinaStrohminger/status/148399

13 Comments
 

To be clear she is teaching 100 (mainly first-year) undergrad students through a legal studies and ethics course this semester and the assignment was basically a pre-course survey. People watched her class today and she mentioned there was also a respondent who put 5 million as the average. She didn't include it because she thought it was a joke, not sure why she didn't think the 800k was a joke as well. Also nowhere did she say she would be sharing the result of the survey with the world

 
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True (I would definitely had put a joke answer down fwiw). Also: 25% of students in her class? I’d venture a guess that the class is about 25% international. If I was in an international country being asked this question, not only would I have no idea, but there’s the whole currency difference factor, making it difficult to compare without crunching the numbers.

 

You can go to a really good school and still be a colossal moron. Some of the dumbest people I knew in college went to ivy leagues (more often than not they were legacy students). Combine that with rich and fairly sheltered and this is a pretty easy result to believe. 

"If you don't have any enemies in life you have never stood up for anything" - Winston Churchill | "It's a testament to the sheer belligerence of the profession that people would rather argue about the 'risk-adjusted returns' of using inferior tooth cleaning methods." - kellycriterion
 

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