On AITF, the fact that Mike Stivic was a full time college student always seemed strange to me. The Bunker family essentially lived paycheck to paycheck with Archie toiling on a loading dock everyday and Mike’s wife, Gloria, working as a saleswoman in a local department store; the Bunkers were a blue collar family, who would be considered to be lower middle class.

With that challenging financial situation, I think Mike would have also worked a
full time job from nine to five and then attended college as a part time student in the evening division of undergraduate school. The family really needed that additional paycheck to help pay the bills. That’s the way it would work in most American working class families.

It always bothered me that we would often see “The Meat-Head” hanging out in the Bunkers’ home at all hours of the day and night, frequently getting food out of the refrigerator and sitting in Archie’s chair and either watching tv or reading Archie’s copy of the New York Daily News, much to Archie’s disgust and annoyance as he returned from an especially hard day at work.

Of course, the late Norman Lear and the AITF writers probably reasoned that they
had to have Mike Stivic enrolled only as a full time day student so that “The Meat Head” could frequently be seen at home to interact with (and, of course, repeatedly argue with) Archie regarding politics, race, religion, etc.

If Mike Stivic worked full time job and was also an evening college student, there wouldn’t have been enough time for him and Archie to lock horns as they often did on the show.

I didn’t like the fact that Archie was killing himself at work everyday and Gloria was working as a saleswoman in a tedious and low-paying job while Mike was leisurely taking classes and probably hanging out in the college student union, drinking coffee, shooting the breeze with some of the other guys and flirting with the pretty girls in his classes.

Mike Stivic was such an insufferable dork, with the bad posture, the bad toupee, the apparent insatiable junk food appetite and with his all-too-annoyingly condescending attitude, as a “full time college student,” that he often displayed towards both Gloria and Archie.

I was glad to learn that Gloria eventually dumped a big loser like Mike “The Meat
Head” Stivic. Gloria and Joey were much better of without the jerk.

They don't make a point of it in the show, but Social Security educational benefits for surviving children were very generous around 1970. Mike wouldn't have been reliant on scholarships and such to pay his educational expenses.

In the original UK series, Till Death Us Do Part, Mike is a lot less educated than in All in the Family. Lear turned the US character into a college student so that he could make more intellectual arguments than the original - essentially making him a stand-in for Lear himself.

Archie was a foreman. Wasn't he?

Archie was a foreman. Wasn't he?

Early in the show, he has three men under him.

I vaguely remember there was one episode where they all played some parlor game, and Mike could not take any criticism. He was so used to dishing it out, it was refreshing to see him "get his."

There is an episode (according to IMDB: season 3, episode 8) in which Meathead receives (as inheritance) some money. Instead of helping the family to make ends meet, he chooses to donate the whole amount to the campaign of a candidate that is running for president. I'm not in the mind of the producer or the writers but I think this episode partly covers how things would look like if Mike had a (part time) job throughout the series.

Spoiler: In the same episode, after some criticism from Archie and Gloria, he gets a part time job (just for this episode) and gives the money to Archie.

It seems to me that the Meathead (in this episode and in general throughout the series) portrays a an irresponsible (in terms of the household financials etc), or overly idealistic character - probably representative of his generation or the wider hippie culture in the 70's.

I remember that AITF family episode. After buying Gloria a new coat with some of that inherited money, Mike, being the idealistic nitwit that he always was, decided to donate the rest of that money to George McGovern’s failed (and, I mean, failed Big Time!) 1972 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon.

What annoyed me was that Mike was always addressing his mother-in-law Edith Bunker very affectionately as “Ma.” Well, why didn’t “The Meat Head” also spend some some more (if not all) of that inherited money on a great gift for his beloved “Ma” instead of donating that money to either George McGovern or Richard Nixon? I mean, the Bunkers were hardly in the same tax bracket as either the Kennedys or the Rockefellers. That inherited money SHOULD
have gone to help pay the Bunker family’s monthly expenses.

For once, Archie was completely justified for losing his temper with a politically-quixotic fool like his son-in-law, Mike “The Meat Head” Stivic, one of American television’s most annoying and insufferable characters, in my opinion.