Yours, Mine, and the Truth: Using a Structured Minimum Wage Debate in the Economics Classroom

This article describes a strategy for using the minimum wage as a classroom debate topic. Classroom debate is an active-learning strategy that encourages students to develop skills that are often lacking in the college curriculum. Specifically, classroom debate promotes critical thinking and encourages students to see topics from various perspectives. Economics topics are well suited for classroom debate because most of the policy arguments have at least two well-reasoned positions. The minimum wage is an economics topic that students tend to care deeply about because it speaks to issues of poverty, income inequality, discrimination, and the economic value of education, and many students in the college demographic earn minimum, or near-minimum, wage. Instructors who use the minimum wage debate in their classrooms will find that students will apply an “economic way of thinking” to issues at the core of the curriculum. JEL Classifications: A21, A22, J