Brain Sprinkles

The other part of the student debt crisis is all of the debt that students aren’t taking on because they’re not going to college. College grads still earn more, work longer, and are employed at higher rates than everybody else. Their investment — that is, their debt — benefits the country at large in the form of a more-skilled workforce, higher productivity, higher GDP, more taxes, and so on. Newspapers can’t report on this part of the student debt crisis, because there is no headline statistic to report on. You can’t put a number on how much money some promising inner-city student is giving up in lifetime earnings by not attending college or how much it’s taking away from federal income taxes through 2030. But just because those statistics are invisible don’t mean they’re not real.