California Maritime Academy Consumer Price Index

The students of California Maritime Academy come from many different backgrounds. We have students from Hawaii, Alaska, Bahamas, and even as far away as Asia. So, the students of California Maritime Academy have all different kinds of wants and needs. Our goal with this paper is to determine an average of what a student will spend in order to attend the California Maritime Academy. We took the essential needs of 40 students and averaged them. An average student needs toiletries, food bought off-campus, and other material things for the student’s dormitory and enjoyment. We also decided to include the cost of tuition and uniform items. We determined this by using the CPI.

A measure that examines the weighted average of prices of a basket of consumer goods and services, such as transportation, food and medical care. The CPI is calculated by taking price changes for each item in the predetermined basket of goods and averaging them; the goods are weighted according to their importance. Changes in CPI are used to assess price changes associated with the cost of living. 

To us, CPI is recognized as the compilation of several school-essential items which are also stacked in a pecking order; more or less a hierarchy of the most important and most often used items to the least. Many economists like to refer to this as a basket. The basket we decided to use is the average prices of student at California Maritime Academy.

We determined our basket by coming up with the essentials for living at California Maritime Academy. The first essential we came up with is toiletries, because whether you shower once a month or everyday everyone needs toiletries. Toiletries include shampoo, body wash, toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant, and anything else that involves personal hygiene.

The second group of items pertains to Room Improvement. We decided to not call it an essential because not everyone wants to buy items for their room. Room Improvement items includes buying rugs, furniture, televisions, paintings, and refrigerators. These may not be necessary to pay for but we found out that a lot of students pay quite a bit of money to improve their living space.

The third item is Food. We don’t mean food as in cafeteria food; we are talking about food you would buy off campus. Such as going off campus to buy fast food or buying groceries for your dorm refrigerator. Since our survey wasn’t limited to on campus residents but also off campus students we feel as if food is an important commodity.