Good article by Sam Frizell in Time magazine. A few excerpts:
“At the end of 2003, American students and graduates owed just $253 billion in aggregate debt; by the end of 2013, American students’ debt had ballooned to a total of $1.08 trillion, an increase of over 300%. In the past year alone, aggregate student debt grew 10%. By comparison, overall debt grew just 43% in the last decade and 1.6% over the past year.”
“Delinquencies on student loans have risen dramatically over the past decade: 11.5 percent of graduates were at least 90 days late on paying back their loans at the end of 2013, compared with 6.2 percent delinquencies on student loans in 2003.”
“Between the 2000-2001 academic year and the 2010-2011 academic year, the cost of a degree at public and private 2- and 4-year institutions rose 70%, from an average of $10,820 to $18,497, according to data provided by the federal government’s Institute of Education Sciences.”
Read the whole thing. (By the way, the “let’s all just ditch college” extreme is as misguided as the “let’s all go to a four-year college at any cost” extreme. See the latter chapters in my book for more.)