The Heritage foundation, at its worse, is accused of the former, Robert Reich, one of the founders of the Economic Policy Institute, is accused of the latter. The two are still very much different, IMHO.

The Heritage Foundation was less than truthful in the social security debate. Even Republicans reprimanded them.

See attached

http://www.cbpp.org/7-5-05socsec.htm

In 1998, the Heritage Foundation issued reports portraying Social Security as a bad deal for Hispanic Americans and African Americans and touting private accounts as a vastly superior alternative.[1] The reports rested upon severe distortions and misuse of data. In a series of striking and unusual developments, Stephen Goss, now Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration, and Robert Myers, the former chief Actuary who for decades was the leading Social Security adviser to Congressional Republican leaders and served as Executive Director of the 1983 Greenspan Commission, issued analyses excoriating the Heritage reports for violating basic analytic standards.

In an analysis issued by the Office of the Chief Actuary, Goss wrote: “The [Heritage] approach consistently overstates the expected number of years of work and consistently underestimates the expected number of years [of benefits] after reaching retirement age. As a result, it grossly understates the expected rates of return from Social Security retirement benefits.”[2] Goss also noted that “by their [Heritage’s] own calculations…Hispanic Americans would be expected to receive a substantially higher rate of return from Social Security than would the general population, on average” but that Heritage had failed to acknowledge this finding in its report.[3] Myers’ critique of the Heritage reports, published in The Actuary magazine, was, if anything, even more damning. He described the Heritage Foundation results as “grossly in error due to faulty methodology.”[4]

This, with the addition of the comparisons above, show the Economic Policy Institute to be the partisan PAC, not the Heritage Foundation.

He probably took some important characteristics, i.e. their age, the industry they work in, where they live, and from that used some sort of statistics given these age groups, these industries, and the part of the country they live in to derive the percentages that are college students and who only work part time. Actually, he probably used something even more rigorously academic than this, but that is definitely where I would start.

Either way, readers of the comment section can go to the U.S. Department of Labor statistics here, re-read what I wrote, and re-read what you quoted from the Economic Policy Institute and see which one seems to be the biased one. Because from my perspective, the Economic Policy Institute has the clear bias.

“Contrary to congressional rhetoric, the typical minimum-wage earner is a suburban teenager or a college student working part time, not the sole breadwinner for a family.”

From the statsitics given it can only be determined that the majority is 16-25 this does not tell if they are still in school. Many people under 25 are no longer in school and many do not have the opportunity to go to college. Nowhere in the data given does it give their family income, nor if they have other family members working or if they are urban or suburban or rural, I do not see the source of this data supporting his hypothesis. As far as part time, read the definition of part-time carefully, it list the hours on primary job it does not factor in if they are working a second job to supplement their earnings. It also does not list if they have dependents. They are making assumptions that are not in the BLS numbers to make their point.