Pay Scale Perspective

Students who work in the dining hall are now paid $9.25 per hour [Page 4, Winter 2016]. Sixty-six years ago when I entered Grinnell as a Younker scholar in 1951, I was required to work in the Student Union 8–10 hours weekly. The hourly wage: 40 cents. In my sophomore year I became the only statistician for the athletic teams with a 25 percent raise to 50 cents and became a lifelong friend of newly arrived Coach John Pfitsch. When I was a junior, Professor George Apostle hired fellow student Charlie Cook [’56, deceased] and me, at 60 cents, to independently solve all the problems in his new college algebra text as a check of his solutions — we found a few errors! In my senior year Professor Grant Gale hired me to grade first-year physics tests and lab reports at the phenomenal salary of 65 cents per hour. That was a 62.5 percent wage increase in three years. Not bad! 

Author Info: 
George Simon ’55
Santa Fe, NM
United States
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