A Summer Job Used to Pay for College. Here's What Changed.

In 1973, annual tuition at the University of Michigan — one of the most respected public universities in the country — was around $600 for in-state students. The federal minimum wage that year was $1.60 an hour. Work forty hours a week for a summer, and you were looking at roughly $1,000 before taxes. That was enough to cover tuition and make a real dent in room and board.

Run that same calculation today. Minimum wage in Michigan is $10.33. In-state tuition at Michigan? Over $17,000. You'd need to work something close to 1,600 hours — nearly a full year of full-time work — just to cover tuition alone.

The degree is still called a bachelor's degree. The gap between those two eras is a chasm.

When College Was an Accessible Bet

The postwar expansion of American higher education was one of the more remarkable social projects of the 20th century. The GI Bill sent millions of returning veterans to college starting in 1944, and the infrastructure that built up around that wave — state university systems, community colleges, federal financial aid — was designed with accessibility as a core value.

Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, that system largely delivered. State governments subsidized public universities heavily, keeping tuition low enough that a middle-class family could manage it without catastrophic borrowing. The federal Pell Grant, introduced in 1972, was intended to cover a substantial portion of costs for lower-income students. And the cultural expectation was relatively simple: go to school, get a degree, get a job, pay off whatever modest debt you'd accumulated within a few years.

College wasn't free, and it wasn't effortless. But it was, for a wide range of Americans, genuinely reachable. The financial risk of going was manageable. The risk of not going was, in many industries, increasingly real.

The Slow Unraveling of the Bargain

The shift didn't announce itself. It accumulated.

Starting in the late 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s, state governments began pulling back on higher education funding. The reasons were varied — recessions, competing budget priorities, tax limitation movements — but the effect was consistent: as states contributed less per student, universities made up the difference by raising tuition.

At the same time, the federal government's approach to financial aid shifted. Grants gave way to loans as the dominant form of federal support. The assumption embedded in that shift was that a college education would generate enough future income to justify borrowing for it — a reasonable assumption in 1980, and a much more complicated one today.

Tuition increases outpaced inflation almost every single year for four decades. According to the College Board, the average published tuition at four-year public universities increased by over 200 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2020, after adjusting for inflation. Private university costs climbed even faster.

Meanwhile, wages for entry-level workers and recent graduates stagnated in real terms for much of that period. The math that had once made college a practical financial decision started to look shakier with every passing decade.

The Debt Generation

The result is a student loan crisis that has become one of the defining financial realities of millennial and Gen Z life in America.

Total outstanding student loan debt in the US now exceeds $1.7 trillion. The average federal student loan borrower carries roughly $37,000 in debt at graduation — and for those who attended graduate or professional school, the numbers climb steeply from there. Doctors, lawyers, and dentists routinely graduate with six-figure debt loads before they've earned their first professional paycheck.

What's changed isn't just the dollar amounts. It's the psychological and practical weight of those numbers. A $5,000 debt in 1975 was a manageable obligation you could clear within a year or two of working. A $50,000 debt in 2024 can follow someone into their forties, shaping decisions about where to live, whether to buy a home, when to have children, and whether to take career risks.

The degree that was once a ladder has, for many people, become a toll road — one you have to pay to enter the middle class, with no guarantee the toll covers all the costs.

Has the Value of a Degree Changed, or Just the Price?

This is where the conversation gets genuinely complicated.

The economic data still generally supports the value of a college degree. Bachelor's degree holders earn, on average, significantly more over their lifetimes than those with only a high school diploma — the "college wage premium" is real and persistent. In that narrow sense, the investment case for college hasn't collapsed.

But the investment case depends entirely on what you're paying for it. At 1973 prices, almost any degree from almost any institution was a reasonable financial decision. At 2024 prices, the calculus is far more nuanced. The field of study matters enormously. The type of institution matters. The amount borrowed matters. The labor market you graduate into matters.

A generation ago, you could go to college without thinking too hard about return on investment. Today, that kind of financial innocence is a luxury most families can't afford.

There's also a broader cultural shift worth acknowledging. College used to be something you did to get a credential and join the workforce. It's now freighted with expectations about personal development, social experience, and identity formation that weren't really part of the 1970s calculus. Whether those additions are worth the added cost is a question every family is now forced to answer for themselves.

The Flip

A college education went from being one of the most accessible investments an American could make to one of the most consequential financial decisions of a young person's life. The system didn't just get more expensive — it shifted the risk almost entirely onto the individual student.

The degree is still worth something. The question nobody had to ask in 1973 — but is it worth this much? — is now the first thing any honest conversation about college has to confront.