this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Data is Beautiful

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The Amount of Work Required to Afford University Tuition (1980-2020) (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Boomer_Checker@lemmy.world to c/dataisbeautiful@lemmy.world
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Workers have to work for a longer period of time in order to afford University Tuition than they used to in 1980. The trend is hardest on minimum wage workers who have to work 32.24 weeks of full-time work in 2020 to afford tuition, compared to 5.95 weeks of full-time work in 1980. This ignores taxes and assumes all money earned is put toward tuition.

Since 1980 the price of a Year's University Tuition has increased by 282% when adjusted for inflation.

Wages have gone up nominally, but not as much when accounting for inflation. The minimum wage has decreased since 1980 after adjusting for inflation.

Sources:

Visualized on boomerchecker.com

Edit:

  • Fixed an error when converting Median and Top 5% from annual to weekly. The time to save for those two brackets rose as a result.
  • Added wage data for the different wage brackets for reference.
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[–] Hangglide@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How much work does it take to label your axis?

[–] Boomer_Checker@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Hahaha, fair enough. I threw some axis labels on there.

[–] bingbong@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This data is sad

[–] Boomer_Checker@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

It's definitely not a good trend ☹️

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Moreso just says minimum wage is terrible. I'm actually pretty surprised that college went down recently relative to median wage.

[–] Spider_Monkey@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This graph is also misleading it show the cost in weeks for a New York college but uses a federal minimum wage (7.25/HR) instead of the New York State minimum wage (14.20/HR) which would bring down the weeks to around 16.

*It was pointed out this wasn’t for a New York college so this isn’t perfectly accurate. Though I think referencing the federal minimum wage is a bad idea.

[–] Boomer_Checker@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

It would be interesting to have a more region-specific breakdown of this information, especially since the U.S. is so big and costs (and minimum wages) vary widely from place to place. I haven't been able to find more granular data, though.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm, looks to me like this is an average of lots of colleges around the nation, not just New York. Where are you getting that info?

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_330.10.asp

[–] Spider_Monkey@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Looks like my reading comprehension failed me. Sorry for the bad assumption.

[–] epchris@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm confused. In the 5% bracket, a $16k tuition: this comes out to like a 900k/year job...is that where the top 5% is?

[–] Boomer_Checker@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I added the wage data for each bracket to the OP for reference. I did have an error where I was dividing the Median and Top 5% annual wages by 40 instead of 52 to get the weekly wage. I fixed that and updated the OP. The average wage for the Top 5% in 2020 is $447,570 annually or $8,607 weekly, so for $16k tuition it would take 1.86 weeks of saving for a Top 5% earner. However the average tuition is $9349, so it would only take 1.09 weeks for a Top 5% earner to save that much.

[–] Artinizal@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Honestly that really puts into perspective how cheap it is lol.

[–] Hangglide@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

How much did it cost your parents to put you in high school? That's how much university costs in other developed countries. There is no reason that the US can't afford 4 more years of school for you. We aren't magically broke after your senior year of HS.

[–] Goatmom@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wouldn't say that's the case. Remember that this is for one year. For many careers, you need four years minimum. Then this also doesn't seem to account for additional costs of living like food and housing you would need while saving.

[–] Artinizal@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago

Yeah and college SHOULD be an investment. We have 8 year car loans, it taking 8 years to pay off 4 years of college wouldn't be bad. I say this as someone about to go in my junior year of college but I work at a crappy factory which pays for tuition for me after each semester, which is extremely common. And costs of food and housing are separate to tuition, which I'd all the schools are in control of. Also, my food and housing is 95% of my income. If you don't work for four years then you taking 8 years to pay it off isn't horrible. The issue is charging interest on a federally backed loan. The government should force these loans to be not for profit.