Katelyn Kowald

The issue that I am going to speak with you today is raising minimum wage. My personal take on raising minimum wage is that we shouldn’t raise it, because I feel like it lowers kid’s ambition to get a higher education and lowers their ambition to get graduate from high school. This article I found on Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archives written by Anna Morris that is over ‘The Effects of the Minimum Wage and Other Public Policies on High School Graduation.’ First I am going to talk to you about the facts I found on this topic and how it correlates to what I think and then I am going to give you a scenario.

One thing stated in this article that really stuck out to me was the fact that the United States spends a lot of money on higher education, in fact we spend more money than any other country on education. Now with that being said, we spend more money than other countries but our high school graduation rate is lacking compared to other counties. “In 2009, the U.S. ranked twenty-one among OECD countries (Morris, 4).” Why is it lacking, I think it is lacking due to minimum wage steadily increasing. “Facing lower earnings in the labor market makes students less likely to leave school to apply for such a job (Morris, 5).” Basically the lower minimum wage is the lower chance that a high school student would drop out to join the work force and a lower chance a high school graduate would continue education to better themselves if minimum wage is too low to support themselves on their own.

If you were able to receive a pretty good amount of money an hour working at McDonalds flipping burgers, let’s say fifteen dollars an hour, then why would you go to the trouble to go to college? People go to college to get a ‘better job’ and make ‘better money,’ but they actually end up getting themselves in debt because of how much school costs these days. If you could make enough money to cover your living expenses and you could take care of yourself with the money you make from that work place then you would not go to the trouble to get your higher education, because you wouldn’t need to go to college, it would just take more effort.

In conclusion, students need to have something to look forward to in life, meaning having a professional job, making good money and putting in the effort to get there. We need to recognize things that are hurting our younger generation’s ambition in this world and fix it. Raising the minimum wage is not going to help these kids see that they need to work hard and study to get where they want to be.