A professor said her students think average Americans make six figures. That’s a long way off.

“”I asked Wharton students what they thought the average American worker makes per year and 25% of them thought it was over six figures,” she tweeted…”One of them thought it was $800k.”

As she estimates the real answer is around $45,000 a year, Strohminger has a hard time wrapping her head around what some Wharton students believed was an average wage.

“Really not sure what to make of this,” she wrote.

Neither did the Internet.

Strohminger’s tweet set off a range of reactions from experts and observers wondering if this classroom interaction accurately reflected what future business leaders think about the state of wages in the United States.

“People tend to believe that the typical person is closer to themselves financially than what it is in reality,” Ken Jacobs, the chair of the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education, told The Washington Post. “It is an odd notion in America that people think of $200,000 or $100,000 as a typical wage when it is quite a bit above.”

According to the Social Security Administration, the average U.S. annual wage last year actually was $53,383, with the median wage at $34,612. The Labor Department reported that median weekly earnings in the fourth quarter of last year were $1,010, which comes out to an annual wage of $52,520, according to MarketWatch.”

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/professor-said-her-students-think-193739478.html

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