A crude--but in this case useful--measure of inflation is just average house cost + average education cost. This is enough to understand the woes of generation Z because education costs and the costs of houses have been increasing by a huge rate and more and more of them require higher education, and then their parents are less and less able to help them with that education due to their own fights with inflation and (in America) that private education becomes more and more necessary.
Their salary to CPI ratio may be better than millenials at the same age, but that just isn't a meaningful indicator of purchasing power for the things they want to buy or for the reality of their financial situation (education debt).
The sticker prices for tuition have drastically increased, but scholarships & bursaries have kept pace, so the average price paid for residents hasn't exceeded inflation. For example, tuition at Harvard for anybody with a household income of less than $150K is $0. Average tuition has gone up drastically, but it is foreigners who are footing the bill. If you exclude foreigners, the deviation is greatly up but the average isn't.
And for housing, how do you accommodate for rising standards? The kind of cramped shared roomming that I used when I was 19 just doesn't exist anymore. The closest approximation is 4 people splitting a 2br apartment. That's less than what I paid, CPI adjusted.
You and I are really talking about two different cohorts, which emphasizes my point. Who are you trying to understand and how are you trying to understand them?
The article and I are talking about early career professionals (mid twenties) and I am trying to particularly understand the ones around me who are struggling to make a housing purchase in the near future. Also, I would never use Harvard as a rubric of average and your decision to use it as an example truly perplexes me. Instead I suggest you have to look at averages and not at isolated price points of particular colleges to understand the woes of a generation. From, https://thecollegeinvestor.com/32031/average-student-loan-de...
> From 1990 to 2013, the growth of student loan debt surpassed the growth in students, going from $24 billion to $110 billion per year, a 352% increase in loans. During that same period, the number of students borrowing increased by 40%.
That is far greater than inflation. The reimbursements may have also been increasing over inflation, but did not compensate the cost increase for the average person I am concerned with.
Standards are not rising. These early professionals will get smaller homes in farther away neighbourhoods for much more, if they could even afford them in the first place.
A crude--but in this case useful--measure of inflation is just average house cost + average education cost. This is enough to understand the woes of generation Z because education costs and the costs of houses have been increasing by a huge rate and more and more of them require higher education, and then their parents are less and less able to help them with that education due to their own fights with inflation and (in America) that private education becomes more and more necessary.
Their salary to CPI ratio may be better than millenials at the same age, but that just isn't a meaningful indicator of purchasing power for the things they want to buy or for the reality of their financial situation (education debt).