And there it is. While everyone’s wringing their hands about community college enrollment and dreaming up ways to make community college attendance even cheaper, the data don’t lie. Community colleges are not empty because they cost too much. They’re empty because they don’t increase income enough to make them worth attending
If you saw the recent article in MLive regarding income in Michigan, you can easily see the problems. First, the income gap between women and men (regardless of education) is more than 29%. This is not about the pay gap, but for those of you who still have questions about it, the pay gap is real.
When you look at income by gender and age, 23% of women in Michigan earn between $35,000 and $50,000 per year. That’s the most common earnings bracket for Michigan women. Fifty-three percent of women in Michigan earn less than $50,000 per year. In Washtenaw County, that could pose a problem.
According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a single adult with no children in Washtenaw County needs to earn $40,000 to live here. If you notice, $40,000 is in that “most common” bracket, but so is $35,000. A person making $35,000 while trying to live in Washtenaw County is running a $5,000 annual deficit just by being here.
While we’re talking income, the data show another significant thing: Washtenaw County has the fourth-highest median income in Michigan, behind Oakland, Livingston, and Clinton Counties. But Washtenaw County has the highest living wage among them – by 12%-15%. You can make more and spend less just by moving to an adjacent county.
Administrators need to move quickly to save the community college
With respect to community college and income, a Michigan woman with an associate degree can expect to make $6,500 per year more than her high school graduate counterpart. That’s about $3 more per hour. With a bachelor’s degree, however, that same woman could make $8 more per hour than she could with an associate degree and $11 more per hour than she could with just a high school diploma.
Which route would you take? (Hint: the math is easy.)
Our well-compensated community college executives simply need to do a better job of identifying new programs that have a high income potential and eliminating those programs that keep Washtenaw County workers under the living wage line. This is especially true for women. The numbers I’ve been looking at today don’t even contemplate the cost of raising a child.
We need better differentiation between the earnings associated with a two year degree and those associated with a high school diploma. Without that, community college attendance will continue to dwindle.
Photo Credit: Sarah Forst , via Flickr
