The Federal Reserve released another report on household debt in the past week or so. The report’s detailing of student debt trends has received considerable attention, including from the New York Times. Since our society loves to tell this hilarious story about our institutions of higher education being factories [...]
A few days ago, I had a purely speculative post about the possibility that the consumption preferences of rich kids are driving up the cost of college. The basic idea of the piece is simple. Most kids do not go to college because they love education. They do so because college is the [...]
I am reading through the latest Jacobin release right now. In it, Chris Maisano has a piece on student debt titled “The Soul of Student Debt.” The basic gist of the piece is that charging for college forces students to make economic calculations about their degree and future career. That is, [...]
I am a fan of the idea that college should be free at the point of delivery, and financed through a universal income-based repayment (IBR) scheme. This would work basically by levying an extra income tax on those who hold college degrees, and using the revenue from that tax to publicly fund colleges. I think [...]
Evan Soltas has a good piece in Bloomberg on the popular misconception that college costs are soaring. The problem he addresses is that the headline number for the price of college is not actually what students pay. Colleges use price discrimination which means that they charge students from wealthier families more [...]
Regular readers will be well-acquainted with my interest in the college wage premium. The fact that college graduates make significantly more than those with lower levels of educational attainment is relevant, I argue, to debates about how best to finance higher education. Well, the Census is out with new wage premium [...]
A new report from Georgetown researchers details the effect of the recent recession and recovery on jobs, broken up by educational attainment. The New York Times and the Washington Post have coverage. Relying on Census data, the researchers figure out how many jobs were lost or gained during the [...]
I find left discussions about the younger generation obnoxious for two main reasons. First, generations are diverse and lack unified or coherent interests. As such, you can’t ever really speak of a generation being harmed, only specific elements within a generation being harmed. The opposite is true as well: you can’t speak about a generation [...]
A great number of students in the United States take on debt when they attend university. This upsets many, and so ideas about how to eliminate student debt altogether have proliferated. Here I summarize the main ones, argue in favor of a universal income-based repayment scheme, and raise some objections to equity financing schemes.
1. [...]
In the popular imagination, college students are people who attend public or non-profit four year institutions. That is how the press depicts students, and those students are the primary constituency of student groups and movements. While it is true that these kinds of students are the majority, there are around 9 million students [...]

