A Wharton prof’s tweet that some students think the average American makes a six-figure salary (wrong!) has the internet outraged

If you’re on Twitter, you might have caught the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, one of the most prestigious business schools, trending on Thursday.

Spoiler alert: It wasn’t for anything good and it touched a slew of topics primed for internet outage, including income inequality, socioeconomic diversity in colleges, and privilege.

Nina Strohminger, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the school, shared what sounds like a sensible academic exercise for someone studying business: What does an average American worker make in a year?

A quarter of Strohminger’s undergraduate students estimated the number to be around six figures.

“One of them thought it was 800k,” wrote Strohminger, and the zingers attacking “out of touch” students flooded the bird app.

Strohminger was not available for comment and her tweet didn’t get into how large her classroom was, if she’s done this exercise before, and whether being off the mark is normal for her students. We also don’t know if the student who guessed $800,000 was serious or simply goofing off. But Strohminger did push back in a follow-up tweet after her initial dispatch took off.

“A lot of people want to conclude that this says something special about Wharton students — I’m not sure it does,” she wrote, linking to a 2011 paper published by Harvard Business School and Duke University researchers.

The researchers asked about 5,500 “regular” Americans to create their “ideal level of inequality.” One takeaway is that the participants vastly underestimated just how much wealth the top 20% of Americans hold.

Barry Schwartz, a visiting professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote a piece of commentary on the paper in 2011, when he was a psychology professor at Swarthmore College. He still remembers being shocked by how off the respondents were.

Still, that was over a decade ago and he thought movements like Occupy Wall Street had “schooled” the country.

“I assumed that that would lift the scales on everybody’s eyes and never again would the country be quite so out of touch with vast inequalities of wealth and income,” he said. “To find out that in 2022 highly educated people are making the same mistake is just appalling.”

Even the media gets it wrong. Not too long ago a MarketWatch article about U.S. inflation came under fire when the reporter went on to categorize $90 bottles of wine and $200 concert tickets as typical purchases made by Americans — the publication has since amended those points.

Using Strohminger’s tweet, people wasted no time to point out the stark reality in American households, especially in Wharton’s West Philadelphia backyard.

According to the U.S. Census data, the national median income for a family household was just over $86,000; for a nonfamily household it’s just over $40,000.

In Philadelphia, the median household income nears $46,000 with 24% of residents living in poverty.

Median household income is far lower in some zip codes. For example, a census breakdown published in 2019 found the median household income in Fairhill, the poorest neighborhood at the time, was just shy of $19,000.

Many internet users shared memes mocking what they could only assume to be sheltered students. Others got to the heart of why what these students know matters.

Penn undergraduate students spend up to $55,000 per academic year on tuition alone, based on the university’s own estimates. It’s a steep bill for an education that comes with great promise.

Wharton students who’ve gone on to earn bachelor’s and MBA degrees from the storied school have become decision-makers and leaders, not only running major corporations like Hewlett-Packard and Pfizer, but also assuming high-ranking political office. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is a Wharton graduate, as is former President Donald Trump.

On Friday, Wharton Dean Erika James took to LinkedIn to reflect on the responsibility of educators to “foster open dialogue” and to “shed light on the range of experiences within society.”

She said it’s likely personal experiences informed the inaccurate guesses, something called the “anchoring effect.”

“And while we cannot change where we come from, we can — and should — work to understand where others are coming from,” James wrote.

Wharton creates a “rich environment for individuals to learn” with a diverse undergraduate student body where almost half the students are women and 20% are not U.S. citizens, according to James.

James reported 60% of 2025′s graduating class identities as a student of color and 12% report being first-generation students.

The tweet continued to pick up steam Friday as more media outlets picked up the story.

For Schwartz, Strohminger’s tweet is more than entertainment.

“It really is diagnostic of a deep, deep lack of connection to the lives of real people on the part of folks who are going to be running the show,” he said.