Who's Gouging?

Being surrounded by liberals on the bus gets to me. There was a discussion of gasoline/oil prices on the bus the other day and go figure someone made the gouging argument. I simply asked:

"Why is it that when it comes to oil companies and gasoline prices that liberals always want to jump on the gouging bandwagon. Yet, they're never willing to hold higher education to the same accord???"

Of course this went over their heads when they asked: "What do you mean?"

I said: "If you take a look at oil prices from 28 years ago vs. tuition prices from the U of M and adjust them both for inflation, you will learn that your gouging argument falls apart. You will also learn that when it comes to any such claim of gouging that your argument would be better vented towards the education establishment."

Annual Average Domestic Crude Oil Price for 1980 (inflationdata.com) = $37.42
University of Minnesota Annual Tuition Rate (Undergrad Resident) for 1980
University of Minnesota: Office of Institutional Research = $927

Inflation Calculator here: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

1980 Crude Oil price inflation adjusted: = $95.86
(trading most recently at about $109 a barrel)

1980 U of M tuition inflation adjusted: = $2,374.65
(ACTUAL current tuition at the U of M for an Undergrad Resident 07-08 $8,950)

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Liberals refute this (albeit not very convincingly) by stating that the $37.42 crude oil price was its peak price.

Fair enough. So, let's take the 1975 price of a barrel of crude and adjust that for inflation vs. the 1975 price of annual tuition at the U of M for an Undergrad student.

1975 Crude Oil price = $12.21 (inflation adjusted for 2008 $48.04)
1975 Undergrad Annual Tuition U of M = $630.00 (inflation adjusted for 2008 $2,478.93)


* Remember to remind your local newspaper or your local news anchor of this little known fact the next time they run a story about the Oil and gas price crisis.