Graduate Student Cost of Living Calculator Report
September 2020: John Bowin, Miriam Greenberg, Veronica Hamilton, Steve McKay, Bruce Schumm, Ankit Sharma, Nirvikar Singh
Introduction: Creating the Graduate Student Cost of Attendance and Living Calculator
Over the course of the Spring Quarter 2020, a team of faculty senate and graduate student researchers at UC Santa Cruz created a prototype for a Cost of Attendance and Living Calculator for graduate students [GCOAL Calculator]. The project was launched in response to a pressing need at UCSC and other UC campuses facing escalating housing costs: to establish affordability thresholds for graduate students, so as to better understand how much support they require in order to cover basic expenses while pursuing their degree. Outside the university such an affordability threshold is commonly known as a “living wage” or “cost of living” [COL]; within the university as “cost of attendance” [COA]. In this project we combine the two terms into “GCOAL” including data relating both to fluctuating local and university-specific costs. This prototype Calculator is now available for access at http://www2.ucsc.edu/gradcosts.
The aim of the project was to generate a user-friendly, regularly updated tool to estimate basic costs that are both specific to students in terminal advanced degree programs — “graduate students” — and to the costs and conditions in the cities and regions in which the ten University of California campuses are based. Such a calculator would have two main uses: 1) personal budgeting by prospective and incoming graduate students as they prepare for costs of a UC degree and 2) informing determinations of appropriate levels of support on the part of relevant campus administrators like the Graduate Division and Financial Aid Office; U.C.-wide officials and research staff like IRAPS and the UC Regents; and graduate student representatives like the Graduate Student Association and the Graduate Student Union [UAW]. Establishing COL and COA would aid in our analysis of the needs of graduate students in general and those with particular needs, including “non-traditional” graduate students, such as those with dependents, as well as first generation graduate students and those from historically marginalized groups.
The Graduate GCOAL Calculator builds on similar ‘living wage” calculators developed by economists and economic geographers in recent years, combining this approach with UC and campus-specific measures of cost of attendance for graduate students.[1] “Living wage” estimates move beyond outdated, limited federal poverty measures by itemizing and regionally-adjusting the actual costs of a “basket of goods” individuals and families need to become self-sufficient, attain economic security, and lead decent lives without falling into poverty.[2] A living wage would be sufficient to enable people to purchase the contents of this basket: a fixed set of necessary consumer products and services valued and regionally-adjusted on an annual basis. This includes generic items like housing, transportation, and food, as well as items particular to household type, such as childcare, and takes into consideration income requirements before and after taxes.
Living wage calculators, then, are user-friendly tools that help individuals, communities, and employers determine a local “living wage rate,” i.e. a wage that allows residents to meet minimum standards of living in a given locality, over a given period of time, and for different types of families. They exclude expenses deemed “non-essential,” including for leisure, entertainment, and eating out of the house, as well as for investment. There are currently three leading models for such calculators, which can be customized for counties and metro areas in the United States: the MIT Living Wage Calculator, EPI Family Budget Calculator, and the Self Sufficiency Standard produced by the University of Washington, with each using slightly different methodologies and measures of basic needs.[3]
Currently, the leading body of data upon which the campus depends to understand the financial needs of and cost of attendance for the UC graduate student body is a survey conducted by the UC Office of the President: the Graduate Cost of Attendance Survey [GCOAS], conducted in 2017.[4] The GCOAS was itself developed as an improvement on previous methods of understanding graduate students’ “basic needs security,” and as a response to growing consensus around the importance of addressing these needs.[5] Results of this survey are now used by UC leadership to plan financial aid packages, as well as to evaluate graduate student stipends.
While aiming to be comprehensive in its measure of basic needs, GCOAS, as with all self-reported survey data on expenditures, is nonetheless a limited metric: revealing mainly what students spend rather than the actual average costs they face in the market. Basing estimates for financial needs on expenditure data is particularly problematic when data collection is limited to a population that faces severe budget constraints.[6] For example, low income and poor people may be forced to delay or forego basic needs, and thus report low overall spending. This is especially true when the cost of basic needs skyrockets, as it has for housing in our region and nationally.[7] Under these conditions, people will respond in a predictable number of ways—cutting costs by living in substandard or overcrowded housing, absorbing the increase by sacrificing other basic needs, or going into unsustainable debt.[8] Thus survey findings of expenditures from a low-income population will reflect (and obscure) these sacrifices, hard choices, and future debts, rather than clearly report what it actually costs to maintain a decent, sustainable quality of life.
A new era of living wage research helps to correct for this by measuring more accurately the actual costs of a wider range of necessary goods and services.[9] They construct a “basket” of essential goods, including housing, healthcare, transportation, food, and childcare, and gather the best available data on the cost of these items in a given place and time, and according to different family types. Further, they help establish thresholds of “basic” or “minimum” needs, which all people should be able to afford, without going into debt, or going without what they need. This would be a modest, sustainable living wage.
How might we apply the lessons of living wage research to the calculation of graduate student cost of attendance?
Both COA and COL measures have been adapted for this project. On the one hand, COL calculations of the basket of goods have been expanded to take into consideration costs and constraints specific to students’ academic life and professionalization—from books and software, to the reality of a 9 vs 12 month wage. On the other hand, cost of attendance considerations have been adjusted to include thresholds or limits within which students can achieve economic security and a decent standard of living in our local region. For the sake of this project, we interpret these thresholds to be those that would allow students to pursue their higher degrees without having to incur significant debt, or be significantly hindered from pursuing their studies by the need to support themselves.
How can we create a calculator that allows us to estimate this combined living wage and cost of attendance?
We started with the goal of taking the comprehensive basket of goods used to measure COA in the GCOAS—with the basket allowing for customization by family size and including housing, transportation, food, healthcare, childcare, and emergency expenses, alongside professionalization costs specific to graduate school. Then, rather than filling the basket with limited survey data for each item, we used the best available cost data from peer-reviewed, place-specific, and regularly updated data sources—following the example of living wage calculators.
Doing this synthesis involved three phases of research. We first evaluated each of these leading calculators in terms of their methodologies and underlying data sources. For consistency and accuracy, we have relied primarily on the University of Washington’s Self Sufficiency Standard (SSS), established by Prof. Diane Pearce and the Center for Women’s Welfare. The SSS was created in 1996, first commissioned by the State of Iowa, as a “bare bones” budget to estimate the minimum income needed to meet essential costs of living. It is now calculated for 41 individual states. Among the calculators, it has the most comprehensive, state-specific methodologies and is widely used by both public and private entities such as federal, state and local governments and workforce councils, non-profit community organizations, and anti-poverty initiatives for policy analysis, in poverty and support research, and as a wage-setting benchmark.[10]
We then conducted nine focus groups with a total of 29 graduate students, recruiting for diversity —including international and domestic students, those who are parents, and those in different fields— to assess the usefulness of existing measures, making sure that the “basket of goods” was comprehensive in capturing all necessary graduate student expenditures. Based on this analysis, we selected our data sources and created a prototype for a cost of living and attendance calculator for graduate students at UC Santa Cruz.
Moving forward, we have five recommendations for the Graduate GCOAL Calculator:
- Use of the calculator for both budgeting and determining student support. Beginning in the coming academic year, we recommend that this tool be used in two ways. First, prospective and incoming UCSC students should be encouraged to use the calculator to estimate their costs, including domestic and international students and those with and without dependents. In addition, we encourage its use by a range of stakeholders concerned, over the longer term, with determining support for graduate education and basic needs, including: administrators, graduate student groups, faculty and faculty senate committees, UC regents, and the California legislature.
- Ongoing development of the calculator by a standing committee. Over the coming two years, we recommend the calculator be updated and upgraded to incorporate additional functionality and customizability that exceeds the scope of this project. In particular, department-based surveys should be developed to enable the addition of discipline specific professionalization costs. Regular updates can be overseen by a standing committee made up of representatives of a) Senate Committees, including the Graduate Council and the Committee on Planning & Budget, b) the Graduate Student Association, and c) Administrative units, including the Graduate Division and Financial Aid Office.
- Improvement of institutional data on graduate students in general, and socioeconomic conditions in particular, for use in conjunction with the calculator. After finding significant gaps and deficiencies in existing graduate student data gathered by GCOAS and other surveys, we recommend that IRAPS and all campus entities concerned with student success gather more of such data and do so more effectively. This should include by a) improving survey design, data cleaning and validation, and calculation of summary statistics; b) greater data transparency, including access to survey distributions and explanation of underlying methods; and c) more regular administration for systemwide, longitudinal analysis. In addition, we recommend UC campuses begin to systematically gather and analyze data on graduate students’ socio-economic status [SES]. This should include by: a) adding SES questions to GCOAS and other surveys, including on first generation status, sources of income, debt incurred while pursuing degree, and number of dependents and b) aggregating SES data already gathered yet not included in the data warehouse, including if possible by Financial Aid and Slug Support. Such baseline data is essential for analyzing issues of equity for graduate students, for instance in correlation with data on race and gender. In addition, it will be necessary for correlating graduate incomes with the costs they bear, as provided by the Calculator, and thus for establishing affordability thresholds.
- Enhancement of the pool of funds available for contingencies and to support nontraditional students. We urge UCSC and the UC as a whole to recognize that students encountering significant unexpected expenses can be permanently derailed from finishing their degrees, at great cost to both the student and the University. In addition, typical levels of support can fall far short of that needed by “non-traditional” students, especially single parents, effectively ruling out the pursuit of a higher degree for such students. This risk of being impeded from pursuing or completing advanced courses of study disproportionately affects under-represented groups, who tend to have fewer alternative resources to fall back on. We thus recommend enhancing the pool of funds available both to support nontraditional students and to help students meet unexpected expenses. The methodology for apportioning these funds, and for advertising their availability, should also be examined, with the welfare of under-represented students in the forefront of the discussion.
- Expansion of the calculator across the University of California. Over the longer term, we recommend the calculator be adopted by and adapted to the local conditions on our nine sister campuses in the UC system, enabling us to compare cost of living and attendance for graduate students system-wide. We imagine such a calculator could possibly even be expanded to other categories of workers, including staff and faculty, and thus help inform decision making around the cost of living for workers UC-wide.
1 Glasmeier, K. A., (2018). Living Wage Calculator. Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Gould, E., Mokhiber, Z., & Bryant, K. (2018). The Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator Technical Documentation. Economic Policy Institute; Pearce, M. Diana. (2018). The SelfSufficiency Standard for California 2018: Methodology Report. Center for Women’s Welfare, University of Washington
2 Anderson, A. and S. Kimberlin (2018) “Better Poverty Measure Shows Economic Hardship Is More Widespread in Certain Parts of California” California Budget and Policy Center; Pearce, D. (2012) “Counting the Poor with Competing Poverty Measures” Self-Sufficiency Standard, University of Washington
3 Glasmeier 2018; Gould, Mokhiber and Bryant 2018; Pearce 2018
4 See: University of California Office of the President, Institutional Research and Academic Planning, “Graduate Cost of Attendance Survey,” 2017. https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic planning/services/surveyservices/GCOAS.html#
5 Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs Student Financial Support, “Findings from the Graduate and Professional Student Cost of Attendance Survey 2016-17” November 2017.
6 Pearce 2012
7 For example, in the zip codes around UC Santa Cruz, the Fair Market Rent levels have increased 20-23% each year from 2017 to 2019. The result is that Santa Cruz county is now the least affordable county in California when comparing median renter wages and median rents. see: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr/fmrs/FY2021_code/select_Geography.odn; https://reports.nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/
8 A detailed study of the housing crisis in Santa Cruz in 2016-18 found that 70% of the 1,734 renters surveyed were “rent burdened” – or spend more than 30% of their income on rent, while 41% of renters faced “extreme rent burden”, spending 50% of their income on housing. High rent burdens led to a high overcrowding level of 27% of all county renters, and half of respondents said they faced difficulty paying bills and/or buying essentials such as food or medicine. See: https://noplacelikehome.ucsc.edu/en/the-survey/
9 Glasmeier 2018; Pearce 2018
10 http://www.selfsufficiencystandard.org/standard-in-practice. For California-specific calculations and methodologies, see: http://www.selfsufficiencystandard.org/California and https://insightcced.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/04/CA2018_Methodology_StateReview.pdf