Category: Education

Bob Hildreth has a howler of a piece at the Huffington Post about the amount of student debt professional degree holders graduate with. Generally, when folks talk about student debt, they stay away from talking about medical school, law school, and business school. Those professions are way more lucrative than almost anything else, and so… Continue reading Student debt blogging at its absolute worst

Catherine Rampell had a piece about degree inflation in the New York Times yesterday. What follows are some scattered thoughts about the piece and degree inflation more generally. First, the piece manages to run down someone with an undergraduate degree that has over $100,000 in student loan debt. The New York Times is really talented… Continue reading Thoughts on degree inflation

I ran across an interesting piece from Open Secrets on members of Congress with student debt. At one point, the article lists the top ten student loan debtors in Congress. Because information about members of Congress tends to be more public, I thought it would be interesting to run down the background details of these… Continue reading Members of Congress with student debt

The achievement gap refers to the gap in educational outcomes between rich and poor kids (and sometimes among white and non-white students). The education reform movement is all about closing that gap. I am skeptical that marginally altering the schooling environment will do much on that front, but we can leave that skepticism aside for… Continue reading Think deeply about what closing the achievement gap requires

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 gatekeeper of… Continue reading Looks like rich kids are driving up college costs