A college education for just pennies.
Yup! Read about what pennies did for this guy with a little mixture of brain power.
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It is no big secret that a college education has become a very expensive investment. Parents and students all face the reality that they will be paying off those darn student loans for many years to come.
But wait! There is a better way.
Just use your brain power. Focus on the problem (lack of money) and a possible solution (sorry, the chance of being adopted by Bill Gates is not a viable option).
A guy named Mike Hayes focused on his lack of capital problem and came up with an incredible scheme to solve it.
Let’s zoom back to 1987. Here we find Mike as a freshman chemistry major at the University of Illinois. Like many others, he is pondering over paying for his education - one that he figures will cost him $28,000 over four years.
Then the brainstorm hit him.
Mike wrote to columnist Bob Greene at the Chicago Tribune and asked for his help. The help was simple - Bob would ask each of his millions of readers to send just one penny to help finance Mike’s college education.
I know, it sounds ridiculous.
But then, what is a penny? Look around you and I bet there is a penny being ignored. Is it in the cushions of your sofa? Under the bed? In your coat pocket? Most people won’t even expend the energy to bend over and pick up a penny sitting on the sidewalk.
Well, Bob Greene decided to play along with Mike’s crazy scheme and published the column on September 6, 1987.
Of course, asking for a penny is fine, but getting people to actually send one is another story. After all, we are a society of couch potatoes. I’m sure that many just read the column and gave a chuckle.
And, there was another catch. You can’t send a penny through the mail for free. Back then it cost 22 cents to mail a first class envelope. In other words, your penny donation was really going to cost you about a quarter.
Surely a scheme like this could never work. Mike was asking for a tremendous amount of pennies. Think about it - $28,000 translates into 2.8 million pennies. That’s a big wad of pocket change to ask for.
Once the newspaper article appeared, the mail came pouring in. They were all addressed to “Many Pennies for Mike” at his home in Rochelle, Illinois.
Some letters were the typical letters of complaint. These people complained that Mike had no right to ask for this money - he was a typical middle-class white male. Surely, many others should get the money before Mike.
But then, no one forced anyone to mail Mike their donations.
After one month of collecting, Bob Greene followed up on his article. At that point, the Many Pennies for Mike fund had received about 70,000 donations. The donations ranged from the one penny asked for to several checks for $100. The average of all donations was estimated to be 34 cents per envelope. In other words, Mike raked in approximately $23,000! He was only $5,000 short of his goal.
Ninety-five percent of the envelopes had a letter enclosed. One person wrote “I’m 76 years old. Here’s a penny. If you use it to buy drugs I hope a bolt of lightning strikes you dead.”. Another letter from Debra Sue Maffett (Miss America 1983) was signed “love” and included a check for 25 smackeroos.
In the end, Mike did get his $28,000 and a bachelor’s degree in food science. No one really knows how much more money came in, but Mike agreed to set up an educational scholarship fund with the excess.
One can’t help but wonder what the IRS thought about this scheme. They probably changed all of their regulations to make sure that the government will get all the money in the future.