Aug. 21, 2006
 
EDITORIAL: Outfitting Today's Students
 
By Dale McFeatters
Scripps Howard News Service
 
Back-to-school is a bittersweet time of year, a poignant moment when youngsters and young men and women take an important next step in their lives. It is also big business. Really big business.
 
Not only will proud parents be watching their offspring head off to school, economists will be watching as well. To equip the young scholars, both college and K-12, families will spend a chart-moving $54.2 billion, up almost 12 percent from last year.
 
Economists had worried that consumers were easing back on spending, the driving factor in economic growth. Not if the consumers have a kid in school or college, they're not.
 
Back-to-school time might not popularly be seen as a pivotal sales event, but the National Retail Federation, which provided these figures, says it is second only to holiday spending and an important economic bellwether.
 
Families of K-12 students are spending an average of $527 this year, up from $444 last year, to send the little scholars back to class for a total of $17.6 billion. But that is dwarfed by the $36.6 billion the families of college students are laying out, an average of $1,113 for freshmen, declining to an average of $558 for seniors.
 
This being the 25th anniversary of the PC, the single biggest item for the college-bound is electronics. College students are spending $10.46 billion, up over 27 percent from last year on stuff that didn't even exist not long ago --laptops, iPods, Xboxes, printer/scanners, flat-screen TVs.
 
Other major purchases, predictably, are clothes and shoes. Spending in this back-to-school season fell in only two categories. Curiously, they are school supplies and textbooks.
 
As parents wave goodbye to the school bus or the campus, they can take pride in what they've done for their children's education, but also what they've done for the Gross Domestic Product. The economists thank them.
 
Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD@SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com