Student debt calculator
Posted at 6:14 p.m., May 30, 2012
This is a screenshot of the full calculator, including all of the controls for picking a wage and picking a type of college.
This is a screenshot of the full calculator, including all of the controls for picking a wage and picking a type of college.
Whenever a user hovers over the chart, the calculator immediately shows how much money is left or still needed in the given scenario.
The NewsHour's coverage of the increasing amount of student loan debt in the U.S. prompts many viewers to write in about how they simply worked their way through college and simply suggest that current and future students do the same. This sounds great and makes sense until you look at how much the cost of college has increased recently, so I worked with our economics team on a simple calculator to illustrate the point. (After I left, the NewsHour redesigned its site, and the article page that embedded this calculator no longer works properly, so I've instead linked straight to the calculator, which wasn't really designed to be as wide as your entire screen.)
We made a couple of basic (customizable) assumptions about how many hours students work each week during the semester and during the summer, and then we show average college costs since 1976 along with either the minimum wage in effect at the time or a user-provided wage. (All of these figures are adjusted for inflation, of course.) From a development perspective, it was particularly interesting for all of us involved to go back and forth with each other about how much we should or shouldn't simplify different aspects of the user experience.
With this, a user quickly can see how much money is left over or still needed for a particular year, which can help to inform discussions about what is or isn't economically possible.