3 ms·

Summing student debt is actually pretty valid - it's showing how much we as a society have invested to date.

• Someone 13y ago
  Not in combination with an 'average income' graph. It would be valid if it were plotted on its own or in combination with, for example, summed marginal income (the total amount of dollars those graduates made more thanks to their education == what the investment older students made brought society). Of course, that is hard/impossible to quantify and it, ideally, should be done per cohort (hard to do, as we don't even know what graduates from 2010 will make 5 years after graduation), but it would be a telling graph, I think. Another way to show the issue in a honest way would be to estimate the number of years it takes graduates to pay back their loans. Again, hard to estimate (a student with $40,000 in income probably _could_ pay back a $20,000 debt in a year, but is it reasonable to expect that?) And, of course, it would probably be very useful to see the combined distribution of (debt,income) pairs. If all students have a debt of 20k, and income of 40k, there is little to worry about. It is more likely, however, that both debts and incomes show large variations, and are only poorly correlated. The data set will both contain that dropout with a company worth millions, a trained neurosurgeon with 100+ k in debt that gets into an accident that invalidates his/her hand just before (s)he has the money to pay for insurance, and a talented, but a bit slow art student with limited commercial talent.