The GREATs (which stands for General Education Assessment Teams) project assigned in this class is discipline specific, and it counts toward the final grade as indicated in the syllabus. All students in all other sections of this course this semester will also complete this project. A common rubric will be used by all faculty to grade the projects.

Students are asked to submit two copies of this project. One will be graded by your instructor which will count toward your final grade. Once the semester has ended, the second copy of the project will be reviewed anonymously and graded again by a team of faculty to determine how students performed on the project as a whole across multiple sections. The last step, will not have any effect on your final grade.

Your work will be collected and evaluated. We will use it to help us collect evidence that demonstrates that our students have mastered CCBC’s General Education skills. We use this information internally to learn what is working well and what needs to be improved, and we use the data we collect to demonstrate to external accreditation agencies that we not only have an effective General Education program, but alsothat we are willing to prove it by evaluating what our students can do.

Let the fun begin!!!!

For this assignment you should interview a person who is at least 20 years older than you are and who was, back when s/he was your age, in a similar economic situation as you are now. In this context, “similar” means the following:

  • About the same general characteristics, in terms of gender, ethnicity, andfamily status.
  • About the same workplace skills, talents, and educational qualifications.
  • Comparable type of work by reference to skill/educational/talent requirements, place in the managerial hierarchy, etc.
  • Comparable life styles—e.g., part-time worker, part-time student, and/or whatever else you consider important in your particular situation.

In the event that you yourself do not work—or not work enough for you to cover a significant portion of your current expenses—you should substitute the person who is your principal supporter (e.g., a parent) and interview her/him, along with a person at least 20 years older, etc. (see above) as the “other pole” of your comparisons. In any case, you should be sure to obtain two comparable individual situations, separated by at least 20 years.

Begin by finding out the hourly wage earnings ofeach person (after tax and other withholdings). This includes yourself or the substitute financial supporter, on the one end, and the older person who was in a similar situation to you/your substitute two or more decades ago. In the event the wage information is in annual rather than hourly terms, you should convert by dividing that figure (again, net of taxes and other withholdings) by the approximate number of hours of work per year involved in that earner’s workload.

Next, find the prices of at least five items then (that is, in the recollection of the older person) and now (that is in your own—or your substitute’s—situation). Examples are

  • The cost of filling up the car (but how would you deal with the possibility that the cars in your comparison may be markedly different in size, efficiency, etc.?)
  • The expense of an evening out with a date (again, are there noteworthy differences in what dating entailed back then and now?)
  • The weekly food bill of the individual or household (here it is important that you try to compare similar numbers/ages of those who are being fed—but do keep an eye open for other changes in the nature of the “food baskets” you are comparing over time)
  • The replacement cost of the user’s main television set or home computer (here you may face some serious challenges adjusting for product quality change as well as consumer viewing habits!)
  • The cost of replacing the car each person is/was using (have consumer choices changed here? How about car performance standards?)
  • The cost of an everyday clothing outfit (and here, too, there may be noteworthy changes in what such an outfit consists of)
  • The cost of tuition & textbooks for a class at this or a comparable educational institution [For your information, thirty years ago, tuition in Baltimore County’s community colleges was $10 per credit (no technology fees, back then); an economics textbook cost $8; a trade paperback as a side-reader cost $4; and minimum wage was $3.25 an hour].

In choosing the above, try to avoid multiple items that belong to the same category and therefore tend to shadow one another in price trends and consumer choices. For example, if you consider the cost of a medical check-up, there is little point also including the cost of health insurance. Since both of these are influenced by fairly similar economic factors, the data that you are likely to gather for each will tend to be multiples of each other. And, by the time you have calculated the percent changes in each item, you will probably discover that your results are nearly identical. It would therefore be preferable to vary your “basket” of items so as to account for distinct trends in quantity, price, and qualitative change over time.

Once you have assembled your data, you should organize them in a table, where you show the cost of each item then and now, divided by the corresponding wage rate. The result will be a list of “real prices” (with hours of work put in as the price deflator). For example, the data cited in the last bullet, above, would show that it took 3.08 hours of work at minimum wage rates to pay for one college credit (this would make the real price of a 3-credit course about 9 and a quarter hours). How many hours do you have to put in to pay for a 3-credit class today? To make your data-crunching easier to follow, please complete the table by showing the percent over-time change in real prices: In the preceding example, imagine that the “today” figure turns out to be 13.88 hours. Dividing this by 9.25, you get a rounded figure of 1.50; this suggests that a class costs 50% more work-earnings today, as compared to back in 1972. (For more details, please check the examples on the back of this page).

After completing your table, conclude by writing a short commentary (1 page), remarking on what you’ve learned from your findings. Include a brief description of the situations of the persons you compared; do these situations reflect some significant kinds of change in our society’s available opportunities for people like the ones you are comparing over time? Also, do you see any evidence that people’s working and spending habits have changed in response to rising or falling real costs—for example, do people select the type of car they own according to fuel efficiency, in reaction to (real) fuel prices? General research will be required for this project. Acceptable sources for this assignment are books, periodicals (which includes magazines, journals, and newspapers), and economic websites. You must use a minimum of two sources one of which may come from assigned readings and at least one scholarly source that you acquire through the library databases. Utilizing scholarly sources—sources from peer-reviewed journals—will improve the level of your analysis. You may use articles from our course text. You may also use sources such as magazine articles, newspapers, etc. You must integrate the sources found into your commentary.Make sure that you do NOT use online encyclopedias, WIKIS, or blogs. These are not considered acceptable sources and will cost you points on your grade. Please refer to the rubric to earn the maximum points available; the descriptions above are the bare minimum.

Note: no handwritten projects will be accepted.

Calculation required:
Money prices / Prices in work-hrs / Change
Item / Now / Then / Now / Then / Absolute / Percent
A / B / C / D / E / F / G
List type of purchase (one per row) / Enter price-now of item on left / Enter price-then of item on left / Divide amount in col. B by wage-now / Divide amount in col. C by wage-then / Calculate (D-E) to find how many hours more (less) you must work for item in col. A / Divide col. F by col. E and multiply the result by 100, to obtain % change in your labor "payments" for each item in col. A
Examples:
Assume that wage-now is = $7.10/hour
Assume that wage-then was = $3.90/hour
(a) Filling up the car:
One gallon of gas / $1.10 / $1.40 / ($1.10/$7.10)= 0.15 hours or 9 minutes / ($1.40/$3.90)= 0.36 hours or 22 minutes / (9 min. - 22 min.)= -13 minutes / (-13/22) x100= -59%
Car tank capacity (lasts 5 days, local driving) / 10 gallons / 16 gallons / Note that what really matters is not just the cost of a single gallon of gas, but rather the actual cost of filling up the car so it can be driven around for a set number of days
Cost of filling up the car / $11.00 / $22.40 / ($11.00/$7.10)= 1.55 hours or 90 minutes / ($22.40/$3.90)= 5.75 hours or 345 minutes / (90 min. - 345 min.)= -255 minutes / (-255/345) x100= -74%
(b) A ball game outing:
Price of one ticket / $15.00 / $2.00 / In this case, the items then and now are identical; the only thing that has changed is their pricing. Since the prices changed unevenly, the actual labor you'd have to put in so as to buy each item would vary accordingly. In Economics 202, you'll learn that this variation might induce you to substitute cheaper items for the more expensive ones; for example, you could buy more beer (3.5 times as expensive) but drink it at home, giving up going to the game and catching it on TV instead (tickets being 7.5 times as expensive)!
Price of a hot dog / $3.00 / $0.75
Price of a beer / $3.50 / $1.00
Cost of a ball-game outing for two / $43.00 / $7.50 / ($43.00/$7.10)= 6.06 hours or 364 minutes / ($7.50/$3.90)= 1.92 hours or 115 minutes / (364 min. - 115 min.)= +249 minutes / (249/115) x100= +217%

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