Indebted

One of the real flaws in the way news is perceived and communicated lies with the way people think about change in the short- and long-terms. There's a bias toward volatility -- important things that yank around a lot, up and down, tend to garner more attention than things that don't. The stock market is a perfect example; while the long-term trend is upward, on any given day the major indices can rise or fall, leading to daily news stories seeking to explain why. Ninety percent of the time this is total b.s.--absent some kind of huge and obviously meaningful financial event, nobody can accurately interpret the collective meaning of the millions of discrete decisions that play out in terms of equity prices. But the stories get written anyway, as do larger stories about the economy, which, being cyclical, tends to always be changing one way or another (it's doing great! now it's tanking! now it's doing great again!).

Steady long-term trends, by contrast, get much less attention--paradoxically, because they're actually more important. A trendline with a constant slope is hard to write a story about, because the "news" today is exactly the same as the news yesterday--so why write about it today? It's not so much change that's newsworthy, in other words, but change in change. The problem is that this logic plays out, day after day, year after year, and one day you look up and the world has become a very different place without anyone seeming to notice--perhaps in a better way, perhaps not.

So it is with college prices and student debt. Every year The College Board puts out a report on college prices, and every year it says exactly the same thing: they're up, a lot, faster than inflation or family income or anything else one might reasonably compare them against. And the impact of this is clear: students have to borrow more money to go college--a lot more. From 1997 to 2007, total student debt increased by 61 percent after adjusting for inflation, to nearly $60 billion per year. This increased reliance on debt has allowed both institutions and public policymakers to avoid making hard decisions about efficiency and affordability in higher education--the subject of my new column in InsideHigherEd.

Update: For those of you who haven't clicked through and read the actually column yet -- and really, what's keeping you? We all know reading blogs is the same as working -- the comments below the column itself are fascinating, there are some truly harrowing student debt stories in there, go check them out.