Education and Inflation

The cost of (almost) everything keeps going up, so it can be hard to tell whether inflation is to blame, or something else. Let's ask FRED.

FRED is the data service of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, and it provides a wealth of consumer and economic data for you to download and work with, including CPI and Chained CPI data. For this visualization, I simply downloaded Chained CPI data for several consumer goods, like Housing, Fuel and Utilities, and Medical Expenses. Given the name of this blog, you can probably figure out where this is going.

Use the filters to show only the series or group of series you're interested in comparing. Hover over a point for details.

Many people and economists (not that those are necessarily discreet) argue with the idea of Chained CPI, but the nuances are beside the point for this purpose, I think. It's interesting to see the comparisons between and among different categories of consumer goods; it's even more interesting to think economists boil much of this down to a single number in explaining what's happening in the economy.

For your reference, CPI (inflation) over the years 2000--2013 has been about 35%, so if you're paying for college, the good news is that alcoholic beverages are cheaper today than they were then.

And as always, this is mostly for interest, and to show general trends. Consult your economist to see if higher education is affordable for you.

Learn About Tableau

Comments

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher). Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held. Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here. It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red. It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...

First-year student (freshman) migration, 2022

A new approach to freshman migration, which is always a popular post on Higher Ed Data Stories. If you're a regular reader, you can go right to the visualization and start interacting with it. And I can't stress enough: You need to use the controls and click away to get the most from these visualizations. If you're new, this post focuses on one of the most interesting data elements in IPEDS: The geographic origins of first-year (freshman) students over time. My data set includes institutions in the 50 states and DC. It includes four-year public and four-year, private not-for-profits that participate in Title IV programs; and it includes traditional institutions using the Carnegie classification (Doctoral, Masters, Baccalaureate, and Special Focus Schools in business, engineering, and art/design. Data from other institutions is noisy and often unreliable, or (in the case of colleges in Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and other territories, often shows close to 100% of enro...

Changes in SAT Scores after Test-optional

One of the intended consequences of test-optional admission policies at some institutions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to raise test scores reported to US News and World Report. It's rare that you would see a proponent of test-optional admission like me admit that, but to deny it would be foolish. Because I worked at DePaul, which was an early adopter of the approach (at least among large universities), I fielded a lot of calls from colleagues who were considering it, some of whom were explicit in their reasons for doing so. One person I spoke to came right out at the start of the call: She was only calling, she said, because her provost wanted to know how much they could raise scores if they went test-optional. If I sensed or heard that motivation, I advised people against it. In those days, the vast majority of students took standardized admission tests like the SAT or ACT, but the percentage of students applying without tests was still relatively small; the ne...

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog