Senators on a Train

(See the main www.senatorsonatrain.com website here!)

The AMTRAK "Who Needs To Go To College?" Calculator -- Tracking the damage of Amtrak's 77% fare hike in 2005 on Philadelphia-to-New York City job commuters --
See how many kids you could have put through college for the price of the 2005 fare hike alone.
Step 1: Describe Kid(s)			Step 2: Design Crystal Ball			Step 3: Calibrate the Damage		Community/Tech	The Big Names
How Many			General Inflation			Wilmington	9/9/05 alone	Bucks County CC Delaware County CC CC of Philadelphia Montgomery Cty. CC Reading Area CC Abington Nursing Harrisburg Area CC Penn. Inst. of Tech. DeVry Lancaster Business	Harvard Yale Princeton MIT Stanford Univ. of Chicago Caltech Duke Oberlin The Julliard
Age Now			School Inflation			Philadelphia	all of 2005
Age Then			Fund's Interest			Cornwells	whole ticket
								PA State-Funded	PA Private
"Mom, Dad, I wanna go to..."					for years	so I can be a Nittany Lion!		Average Public Penn State U. of Pittsburgh Temple Cheyney East Stroudsburg Kutztown Shippensburg Slippery Rock West Chester	Average Private Univ. of Pennsylvania Swarthmore Bryn Mawr Bucknell Villanova Drexel Carnegie Mellon Gettysburg Lehigh
		Right Now	At Start Of College		By End Of College	This is how many kids you could have put through college!
One Year's Tuition
College Funds
Monthly Outlay

Calculator Explanation

I decided to build this actual, robust, working college calculator to demonstrate the real-life impact on individuals' personal finances, especially the finances of someone supporting children and expecting to see them through a college education.

This calculator is a little different (and, in some ways, better) than most college calculators in that it adjusts savings contributions -- the "monthly outlay" -- to be constant with respect to general inflation. It also allows separate assumptions for the rates of general inflation, tuition inflation, and anticipated return on long-term tax-free investments lodged in a special tax-free school savings account, like a Pennsylvania TAP 529 account, for instance.

Because the 2005 fare hike imposed on commuters was essentially a policy shift as to how much discount commuters can receive on their tickets, it is likely that, should it not be repealed, the price differential between rates determined by the old policy and rates determined by the new policy will also grow with inflation. Thus the monthly outlay lost due to Amtrak's fare increase effectively increases over time.

Assuming that the parent keeps contributing to the account all the way through the college years, the "end of college" funds figure indicates how much money is still left, or, if negative, how much debt is likely owed.

You can change the number of kids, their current ages (all assumed to be the same age), play with inflation and investment assumptions, and test out various colleges (40 listed) based on the most recent current cost figures I could find. You can even specify the size of your current college nest egg as part of the calculations by changing the text box entitled "college funds, right now."

Try out the three different commuting base cities, and the 9/9/05 fare increase by itself, or in combination with the two other fare increases of 2005. You can even check out how not commuting at all would affect college finances.

Once you run the numbers, you'll be able to appreciate why people are jumping off the trains and into cars.