Wow, the article's presentation of statistics is abysmal and certainly intentionally misleading. The chart produced, by including each bar as all persons that have greater than the level of debt, rather than into bins, means everyone in bars to the right is also included in the count of bars to the left. Sure, she explains this, but it is completely different than normal convention, isn't going to be expected or realized but any but careful readers, and the result is to support her assertion that debt levels are not that high by massively misrepresenting the left side of the chart.<p>Then there is the issue that she is not even including anyone who graduated in less than 6 years! It's hard to imagine that if we saw those numbers they wouldn't skew the curve as well. The whole presentation reeks of cherry picked data classification.
I believe the point of this article was not to trivialize college debt but to criticize the media's frequent citation of college loans in excess of 100k for an individual.<p>Part of the debt problem has been the dearth of students going into high demand majors (mostly STEM). We on hacker news know the benefit of a engineering/computer science degree and being even marginally good at it comes with great rewards.
> Even among recipients of bachelor’s degrees, 90 percent manage to graduate with less than $40,000 of debt.<p>This seems inaccurate to me. I graduated from a Canadian University (which are very cheap for the quality of education they provide) and accumulated ~30K in student loans for tuition and living expenses.<p>If I went to a school of similar caliber in the US, I would need more than that for a single year!
I wrote a long reply to this, but it was too big for HN. Now on my Tumblr instead.<p><a href="http://tibbon.tumblr.com/post/13839164804/i-am-the-1-of-student-debt" rel="nofollow">http://tibbon.tumblr.com/post/13839164804/i-am-the-1-of-stud...</a><p>Its the perspective from someone that is in well over 100K of student loan debt- me.
Maybe it's just old-fashioned thinking (you know, like Henry Ford or J.P. Morgan) but I had always been taught "Don't buy stuff you can't afford!" kind of like this SNL clip: <a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/1389/saturday-night-live-dont-buy-stuff" rel="nofollow">http://www.hulu.com/watch/1389/saturday-night-live-dont-buy-...</a><p>It's really too bad that students are sandwiched between the "Gimme everything now!" attitude and such a grim employment outlook, but since when should you not have to repay what you borrowed? It's almost like such easily available credit of the past few decades has caused us to forget what exactly a loan is: <i>borrowing</i> money with the promise to repay it in the future.
If anyone wants to get a hold of her and let her know just how wrong and narrow minded she is:<p><a href="http://www.tc.columbia.edu/academics/?facid=js3676" rel="nofollow">http://www.tc.columbia.edu/academics/?facid=js3676</a>
Note that the first graph is "Six Years After College Entry". So that's 1-2 years after graduation. BARELY any time (if any) for interest to accumulate (as it doesn't while you're still a student).<p>I'd like to see a graph of 5 or 10 years after college graduation.<p>Edit: I was misinformed about college loans, please read the comments below this post. It is worse than I thought.
Always, always, always find a school that will pay your way. I racked up a "mere" $10,000 as an undergraduate (thank you, Bay Area, for your insane cost of living), and even that was too much.<p>As a result, money ended up being a big part of the graduate program I chose. This allowed me to actually <i>make money</i> on graduate school. The lesson being: college is a system, and you should learn to game it.