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> What you need to chart this is some measure of how much college students actually are earning over time, not a measure of the lowest wage it's legally permissible to pay them.

That would only be useful if either a) we knew there were no students working minimum wage jobs or b) we were unconcerned with students unable to obtain higher paying jobs

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I'm responding to the headline claim that it's allegedly impossible to work oneself through college. The corrected claim is that it's quite difficult to work through college on a minimum-wage job. But probably still possible for some if you're a CS major or an architectural major or any number of other majors. Basically, if your degree is one that promises to be lucrative or if you have any other valuable skills or expertise you can probably get SOME of the value of having a degree before you actually finish it by working in a degree-relevant field.

You need to have the money upfront to pay for the first two years of college, though. You can't use money you won't earn for another two years to pay a tuition bill that's due now.

At the amount I was getting paid in 2007, it would have taken me 33.3 years to save up for the first two years of in state public college.

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