What Wharton students Think the Average American makes - Twitter thread gone viral
Can't link the tweet but pasted the body below:
"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)"
Thoughts on this? Of course Twitter is gonna rant about elite vs poor but even if we are talking about a rich student, don't think they would be that stupid right? I feel like she just selectively chose the wealthiest and not so great students and asked them.
Yeah I mean we don't know anything about the sample. In fact, she could have asked like 4 of them and one typoed 80k to 800k for all we know (I don't think that's what happened, but given the particularly vague wording, I'm not holding my breath that this was done rigorously).
I think it's likely that the average Wharton student would think it's above $45k, but I would expect the vast majority of them to be somewhere between 40k and 80k on guesses.
That 800k was definitely a typo for 80k lol.
To be clear she is teaching 100 (mainly first-year) undergrad students through 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
Yikes. I would be very interested to see the size of the sample. Penn says that 46% of undergrads receive grant based financial aid, and although it doesn't distingish for Wharton specifically I find it unlikely that all or even a larger size of most Wharton undergrads are in that 54%. I think you would have to be really out of touch with reality to think the average american makes $800k so I bet that was either a troll or typo.
If the study was for PhD/MBA students or a mix of those with undergrads I find the results even more ridiculous and difficult to believe, given all of those additional years on the earth. Still though, when it is all said and done anyone can cry about what some Whartonite believes the average income is. I would like to see twitter users asked what the average IQ is.
Something I haven’t heard others mention: Wharton (the grad school, at least) is 36% international students. If I was an international student and was asked this, not only would I have no idea, but I would have to deal with the currency exchange factor. For example, if I was from Japan and was asked this question about US salaries, without think of it very much at all I would say of course most people make over six figures (six figures yen is three figures usd)
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