What about high school?

By Published by The Editorial Board

Published: July 25, 2008

Minimum wage workers got a raise Thursday. The federal minimum wage is now $6.55 per hour, up from $5.85.

The Associated Press reports that next year’s federal minimum wage increase to $7.25 an hour will surpass those states that — unlike Virginia — chose to raise their minimum wages. Those states passed higher minimum wages because they grew tired of waiting for Washington to do it.

Minimum wage increases have always been politically controversial — and difficult for the federal government to approve — because of the endless debate over the role of the minimum wage on job creation and employment.

But Congress missed an opportunity to forge a compromise — and underscore the importance of education — when it decided that every minimum wage worker should get a raise.

If minimum wage increases were given just to high school graduates, it would create a financial incentive for people who have not finished high school to do so. It would also serve as a financial deterrent to teenagers thinking about dropping out.

Instead, we have a federal minimum wage that gives everyone the same hourly pay rate regardless of how far they went in school.

The labor market already rewards people in certain fields with more money for earning higher academic degrees. The federal minimum wage could be used to communicate that message to the country’s lowest paid workers.

What would happen today if a high school dropout learned that while everyone else was getting a raise to $6.55 per hour, he would be stuck at the old minimum of $5.85 per hour? Wouldn’t that be an incentive for the dropout to return to school to get his diploma or GED?

Few American workers actually earn the federal minimum wage. The AP reports that just 2.3 percent of the nation’s hourly workers were paid the minimum wage last year, down from 15.1 percent in 1981. A big reason for that is few companies can afford to pay the minimum wage because so few workers can afford to work for that little. At $6.55 per hour, a full-time minimum wage worker will earn just $13,624 a year.

But the federal government could have done all minimum wage workers a favor by tying their wages to the amount of education they have. We keep saying in this country that education matters, but this was a chance for us to prove how much it matters.