President Obama walks to a stage to speak after touring Everglades National Park on Earth Day, Wednesday, April 22, 2015, in Florida. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)
On Wednesday, President Obama announced a new program during his Earth Day speech in Florida's Everglades. Starting this fall, he said, his "Every Kid in a Park" program would grant free admission to any national park to fourth-grade students and their families. Since we are notorious budget hawks, we wondered: Just how much money is this going to cost?
So we need to answer a few questions, here:
1. How many fourth-graders are there?
2. How big is a fourth-grader's family?
3. How much is admission to a park for the family?
4. How many fourth-graders would normally go to a national park with their families, anyway?
Which we answered.
1. How many fourth graders are there?
This bit of data, the government tracks. It's actually pretty interesting, because the Census Bureau offers enrollment by grade broken down by age. Which lets us know, for example, that in 2013, 38,000 high school seniors were between the ages of 25 and 29.
At every age from 3 to 20, what grade kids are in is shaped like a bell curve. Some are in a lower grade than their peers, most are in grade their-age-minus-five, and a smaller group are one grade more advanced. A few thousand are two grades forward or backward, but not many. The distribution in 2013 looked like this:
Neat, right?
OK. So how many fourth-graders are there? You can see that the distribution by age gets wider as kids get older; the height of the age 16 bell curve is lower than the age 7 one. (Which is why the graph above looks like it is tilted slightly.) In 2013, there were 4.1 million fourth-graders, ranging in age from 7 (22,000 of them) to 12 (52,000). Most were 9. Of course, that was 2013, meaning that those kids are now in sixth grade (or fifth grade or seventh grade or, lamentably, fourth grade still). But we'll use it.
2. How big is a fourth grader's family?
The Census Bureau has data on this, too. In 2010, the median household size in the United States was 2.59 people. But that includes households without children which, generally speaking are smaller. Looking only at family households, those with kids and at least one parent, the median size was 3.24 people.
Over the long term, it's been trending downward. But that's a safe enough figure to use for this -- particularly once we start looking at prices.
3. How much is admission to a national park for a fourth-grader?
This varies widely. Some parks, like Yellowstone, charge by the vehicle ($25 per car, in that case). To go to Ellis Island, you need a ferry ticket, which is $9 for kids under 13. Picking one at random, Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park has some free attractions and some that cost money -- $8 for adults and $5 for children, for example.
But again, we're talking about a family. In Dayton, it's going to be $8 + $8 + $5 for two parents and a fourth-grader, or $8 + $5 + $5 + $5 for a fourth-grader, his dad and his two sisters. That's $21 or $23. Yellowstone is $25 for all 3.24 of them. Ellis Island is a little pricier: north of $30 for the whole crew. Since there is so much variance, let's use the Yellowsone figure, which is pretty much in the middle. The family would normally pay $25.
Unless they are in the military or seniors or get an annual pass and so on and so forth. We're sticking with $25.
4. How many fourth-graders would normally go to a national park with their families, anyway?
The National Park Service has a pretty amazing site that offers detailed statistics on visitors to every national park. Here, for example, are visitors to Yellowstone over the past century.
There's also a page with national metrics. Yellowstone, no doubt due to its not-super-convenient location, ranked 22nd in visits in 2014. At the top is Golden Gate, which is in the middle of a city, which is cheating. Last on the list? Aniakchak National Park in Alaska. Its Web site promises "No Lines, No Waiting!" right at the top. Which sounds about right, since just 134 people visited last year.
That doesn't tell us what we want to know, either. The parks in total saw 292 million visitors in 2014, just shy of the population of the United States. But that includes people from other countries and those ambitious Americans who went more than once.
There's one bit of data that we can use, though. Last year, 800,000 kids signed up to be Junior Rangers. The program isn't in every park, and not every kid who goes to a park gets the little badge and activity kit that comes with it. But the age range for the program is 5 to 13 -- squarely in the rang we're talking about.
In 2013, there were 35.3 million kids enrolled in school in America aged 5 to 13. Of those, 4.1 million were in fourth grade -- or 11.6 percent of the total. So if we assume that 11.6 percent of the Junior Rangers were also fourth graders, we're looking at about 93,000 fourth-grader visitors.
Now here's a key point: Obama's goal is clearly to get more people to come to the national parks. So one might be tempted to say that the amount of revenue we're missing is unknowable, since we don't know how many more might come, given that incentive. But that's wrong, because those people wouldn't have come without the incentive, and therefore, there's no lost revenue.
So figuring $25 per family and 93,000 fourth grade families, we're talking about $2.3 million in lost revenue.
We're confident the nation will survive.
Philip Bump writes about politics for The Fix. He is based in New York City.
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