State governments and nonprofits always trying to come up with new ways to make life easier for students; among the new innovations are “lifestyle calculators” that supposedly help students figure out if the likely earnings from a course of study will allow them to live the way they hope to.
In today’s Martin Center article, Graham Hillard takes a look at this phenomenon.
He writes:
The basic premise of these tools is that users answer questions about their spending habits and see lists of jobs and salaries that might facilitate them. Yet how many of these websites are operating as intended? I recently spent an afternoon with five of them to find out.
Here’s Hillard on the state where he resides, Tennessee:
Tennessee
The Tennessee Higher Education Commission offers prospective college-goers a “Lifestyle Calculator” page, whereby users learn “the true cost of the lifestyle [they] want and how much [they’ll] need to earn to afford it.” Having first selected their county of residence, users choose from among pre-programmed food, transportation, healthcare, and leisure choices, going so far as to tell the site whether they wish, as future adults, to pair their “work clothes” with “accessories.”
He identifies a serious problem with the site, namely, its cost of living figures. Some places in Tennessee cost much more than do others, but the “calculator” doesn’t take that into account.
Hillard has a rather better opinion of Georgia’s calculator, and he also has a good opinion of Indiana and North Carolina.
It seems to me that the biggest benefit in this might be to deter students who want to live comfortably from majoring in leftist ideology.