Missing the Big Picture « The Quick and the Ed

Missing the Big Picture

The Post went on the front page this morning with news of how the credit crunch is making student loans less available and more expensive. One student explained the consequences:

Andrew Helms, 24, a master’s student in Arab studies at Georgetown, said he had to take out $50,000 in loans to cover the first of his two years of graduate studies. He still has undergraduate debt to pay off. His federal loan is fixed at a 6.3 percent interest rate, while his private loan rate has reached 7.8 percent. Any rise in the latter would be “a substantial concern,” he said. School debt “determines what you’ll do after graduation,” he said. “People who want to go into humanitarian work will have to wait until 10 to 15 years down the road until after you have paid off your loans. . . . I might have to sell my soul to an oil company.”

It’s worth mentioning–since the Post doesn’t–that the odds of Mr. Helms having to prostitute himself to Exxon/Mobil are less a function of marginal interest rate changes than the fact that he just borrowed $50,000 for one year of graduate school.

Long-term trends rule the world. It’s those simple straight lines, steadily ascending from the lower left to the upper right, that define the basic nature of our lives. Even more so when the change is exponential, like compound interest or global population growth over the last hundred years. But paradoxically, the steadier–and thus more important–the trend, the less likely it is to be “news” because news is new and long-term trends are well-known and always happening. There’s no “ta-da” moment, no intriguing hook, no fresh angle. So it is with steeply rising college tuition, which had become so regular and unchanging that we’ve come to accept it as inevitable, and thus not newsworthy in anything but the most general way. Less important, temporary changes like interest rate fluctuations make headlines, the massive sums to which those rates are applied don’t.