seat-v1_2-student-monthly-survival-hours-1990-2025

Open CC BY 4.0 dataset and tools for “Monthly Survival Hours”: how many work hours a U.S. student must sell per month to cover housing, food, transport, phone/internet, books/supplies, and uncovered tuition/fees.

Student Affordability Toolkit (SEAT) v1.2

U.S. Student Monthly Survival Hours, 1990–2025

License: CC BY 4.0

For students and advisors

Budgeting tool + plain-language explainer + calculator:
https://www.thepricer.org/student/resources/

That is the link colleges and student support staff share with students.
It turns this dataset into an estimate of “How many hours do I have to work each month just to stay housed, fed, connected, and enrolled?”

What this repo is

This repository publishes SEAT v1.2 (Student Affordability Toolkit), an open dataset that measures Monthly Survival Hours (MSH) for U.S. students.

Monthly Survival Hours (MSH) =
How many paid work hours a typical student must sell each month to cover:

• shared off-campus rent + utilities
• groceries / basic food
• local transportation
• phone + internet
• books / supplies
• uncovered tuition / fees

The timeline currently covers 1990–2025.

We provide the data in two ways:

• Dollar costs per month for each category
• The same basket expressed in hours of work at that year’s federal minimum wage (adjusted to approximate take-home pay)

These numbers are designed for:

• financial aid / basic-needs / student success staff
• orientation / first-year budgeting workshops
• journalists covering cost-of-attendance, retention risk, and student work burden
• policy / completion / basic-needs teams

Files in this repo

• data/
  • Final public CSV tables for SEAT v1.2
• docs/METHODS.md
  • Basket definition, wage assumptions, methodology
• docs/DATA_DICTIONARY.csv
  • Column descriptions
• CHANGELOG.md
  • Version history for SEAT releases
• LICENSE
  • Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Suggested student-facing copy you can reuse (CC BY 4.0)

You can paste this text directly into financial wellness / basic needs / budgeting pages:

Citation / attribution

SEAT v1.2 is released under CC BY 4.0.
Please attribute as:

Preservation / mirrors

For audit/compliance and long-term access, this dataset is also archived under CC BY 4.0 in:

• Harvard Dataverse
• openICPSR
• Hugging Face Datasets

Those mirrors exist so institutions can verify provenance.
For students, please link: https://www.thepricer.org/student/resources/