“Real Pay” for Grades

One of our daughters had one of those friends that you wish would move to Wisconsin or somewhere else far away. This little eighth grade buddy of our daughter Sally was always saying things we wished she wouldn’t hear, giving her ideas we wished she hadn’t thought of and bragging about things she could do that we didn’t allow our daughter to do.

One day she told Sally that she got $100. for every A on her report card, and Sally, of course, brought it to our immediate and urgent attention.

We had always had a thing against paying for grades. It was not a part of our family economy, and it seemed like such an artificial motivation and a bad substitute for an understanding of the lifetime “real value” of education.

But it sounded pretty good to Sally!

We thought about it for a couple of days and sort of blundered on to an answer that actually worked beyond our expectations.

I started looking up studies I had heard about regarding education-based variables in people’s earning potential and found that in that particular year, the median annual income (in round numbers) for people without a high school degree was $25,000, for those with a high school degree it was 35,000, for those with a college degree it was 56,000, and for those with a professional graduate degree it was over 100,000.

I shared these numbers with Sally, and we talked about the connections between grades and getting into colleges, getting into really good colleges, and going to graduate school. She must have done a little thinking about it, because I from the back seat of the car pool a few days later, I heard this conversation:

Sally: How much is it that you get for every A?

Friend: $100.00. How much do you get?

Sally: Well, I actually get like $75,000.00 every year for the rest of my life if I get mostly A’s

Her explanation of that to her friend was not very complete, and I’m not sure the friend got it. But the point is that Sally got it, and her motivation for working for good grades was based on real numbers from the real world rather than on some form of parental bribery.

And it was also kind of fun to hear her little know-it-all friend become fairly speechless for once in her life.


One of our daughters had one of those friends that you wish would move to Wisconsin or somewhere else far away. This little eighth grade buddy of our daughter Sally was always saying things we wished she wouldn’t hear, giving her ideas we wished she hadn’t thought of and bragging about things she could do that we didn’t allow our daughter to do.

One day she told Sally that she got $100. for every A on her report card, and Sally, of course, brought it to our immediate and urgent attention.

We had always had a thing against paying for grades. It was not a part of our family economy, and it seemed like such an artificial motivation and a bad substitute for an understanding of the lifetime “real value” of education.

But it sounded pretty good to Sally!

We thought about it for a couple of days and sort of blundered on to an answer that actually worked beyond our expectations.

I started looking up studies I had heard about regarding education-based variables in people’s earning potential and found that in that particular year, the median annual income (in round numbers) for people without a high school degree was $25,000, for those with a high school degree it was 35,000, for those with a college degree it was 56,000, and for those with a professional graduate degree it was over 100,000.

I shared these numbers with Sally, and we talked about the connections between grades and getting into colleges, getting into really good colleges, and going to graduate school. She must have done a little thinking about it, because I from the back seat of the car pool a few days later, I heard this conversation:

Sally: How much is it that you get for every A?

Friend: $100.00. How much do you get?

Sally: Well, I actually get like $75,000.00 every year for the rest of my life if I get mostly A’s

Her explanation of that to her friend was not very complete, and I’m not sure the friend got it. But the point is that Sally got it, and her motivation for working for good grades was based on real numbers from the real world rather than on some form of parental bribery.

And it was also kind of fun to hear her little know-it-all friend become fairly speechless for once in her life.