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College Tuition and Minimum Wage Analysis

This repository contains data, sourcing notes, and analysis for the September 4, 2014 BuzzFeed article, "These Charts Show How Much College A Minimum Wage Job Paid For, Then And Now," by Greg Schoofs.

Data and Sources

This repository's data/ folder contains three data tables:

• average-tuition.csv: The average in-state tuition and mandatory fees at four-year public institutions for the school years beginning in 1969 through 2011. Source: National Center for Education Statistics

• federal-minimum-wage.csv: Federal minimum wages from 1939 to the present. Source: Department of Labor

• specific-schools.csv: In-state tuition and mandatory fees in 1976–77 and 2014–15 at three prominent public universities, as well as current state-level minimum wages in their respective states. Sources: Department of Labor for state-level minimum wages; see below for school-specific data sources.

Note: Dollar figures are not adjusted for inflation

School-Specific Data

• University of California, Berkeley

  • 1976–77: $637.50, per the author's recollection and as confirmed by the university's press office.
  • 2014–15: $12,972. Source: http://admissions.berkeley.edu/costofattendance

• University of Virginia, Charlottesville

  • 1976–77: $734. Source: http://avillage.web.virginia.edu/iaas/instreports/studat/dd/fees.htm
  • 2014–15: $12,998. Source: Same as above

• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

  • 1976–77: $941. Assumes two terms at any of the undergraduate schools or colleges. For each term, $464 in full tuition and mandatory fees, plus a "Health Service Fee" of $12.00 and a "School and College Government Fee" of $1.00. Two small additional fees — the "Michigan Student Association Fee" and "PIRGIM Fee" — were refundable upon written request. For that reason, we do not include them. Source: http://www.umich.edu/~bhlumrec/um-fees/1976_fees.pdf
  • 2014–15: Two terms at the College of Literature, Science & the Arts, undergraduate, lower division. For each term, $6,579 in tuition and $164.19 in mandatory fees. Source: http://ro.umich.edu/tuition/tuition-fees.php

Analysis and Charts

notebooks/charts.ipynb contains the code used to analyze the data and create the charts associated with the article. That file is an IPython notebook. A rendered version of the notebook, can be viewed viewed here.