Professor Goes Viral for Revealing Students at Trump’s Alma Mater Wharton Think Average US Worker Makes Over Six Figures

A professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School has gone viral after revealing that a significant percentage of her students have no idea how much the average American worker makes a year.

Nina Strohminger, a professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at Wharton, took to Twitter on Wednesday to share that 25 percent of her students think the average United States salary is over six figures.

I asked Wharton students what they thought the average American worker makes per year and 25% of them thought it was over six figures. One of them thought it was $800k. Really not sure what to make of this (The real number is $45k)

— Nina Strohminger (@NinaStrohminger) January 20, 2022

“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 wrote. “One of them thought it was $800k. Really not sure what to make of this (The real number is $45k).”

Yes, one student apparently thought that the average American worker made well above what the top one percent makes annually, according to Bloomberg. 

“The top 1% represents about 1.3 million households who roughly make more than $500,000 a year — out of a total of almost 130 million,” an October 2021 Bloomberg report shared.

Twitter users were quick to hit at the Wharton School demographic, one linking to a 2017 New York Times report that determined “the median family income of a student from Penn is $195,500, and 71% come from the top 20 percent.”

“At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League – Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown – more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent,” the study further revealed.

Strohminger, however, defended her students, arguing that people are generally bad at estimating average incomes, as many believe “the gap between rich and poor is smaller than it is.”

This was indeed why I asked bschool students: I was curious if they were as biased as everyone else. Further reading: https://t.co/OrvHCbdJO7 and https://t.co/glE3mu1a9X

— Nina Strohminger (@NinaStrohminger) January 20, 2022

The professor additionally linked to two studies that exposed the general misunderstanding surrounding wealth inequality in the U.S., one of which concluded that Americans “construct ideal distributions that are far more equal than they estimated the United States to be—estimates which themselves were far more equal than the actual level of inequality.”

In reality, according to the Social Security Administration, the average U.S. annual wage last year was $53,383, and the median wage at $34,612.