Study; Students Pump Millions Into Local Economy

Econ Graphics 2

Written by Kelly Martinek and Esther Seawell

Over three million dollars.

That’s how much Seaholm students pump into the local economy every year.  But where exactly does it come from?

The Highlander conducted a survey asking Seaholm students how and where they spend their money.

Using and by handing out physical copies of our questionnaire, we received over one hundred responses from Seaholm freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, showing what kind of role Seaholm students individually play in Birmingham’s economy.

To get an idea of how Seaholm as a whole plays into the economic structure of the city, we took these results and analyzed them further.  To get the most accurate numbers, we took an average of the data collected and multiplied it by 1,369 students.

What we found was that Seaholm students are a large part of Birmingham’s economy as a whole. The survey results show that Seaholm puts an average of $3,286,243 into the economy every year.

We broke this down into four categories: food, gas, entertainment, and clothing.

Seaholm students, as a whole, reported spending approximately $21,450 on entertainment every month.  The most popular entertainment activities were movies, sporting events, and skiing/ snowboarding.

They also spend about $31,050 on food, including fast food and coffee runs, in a typical month, according to survey results.  In the past month, the largest number of respondents had spent money at Starbucks, Leo’s Coney Island, and Panera Bread.

They reported approximately $24,450 spent on gas each month.  This number is especially staggering considering about fifty percent of the students at Seaholm, the underclassmen, don’t own cars.

In the clothing category, the total was about $80,951 reported spent per year.  In the past month, more students had shopped at Target, Nordstrom, and Lululemon than anywhere else.

In a typical week, a total of $28,537 is spent on food, $23,273 on gas, and $19,134 on entertainment by Seaholm’s 1,369 students.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s