Hello and welcome to serious inquiries only. This is episode 486. I'm your host Thomas Smith. Got a fun one for you today. Dr. Janessa Seymour is here to debunk a really terrible article by The Economist. According to The Economist, there actually is no student loan crisis. There is no college affordability crisis. None of that. Good news, everyone. It just doesn't exist. How in the world are they making that claim? Well, you'll find out. But in addition to looking into that, we talk a lot about in Janessa, brings a lot of numbers to bear on whether or not higher education, going to college, whether or not it's like worth it just purely in a financial sense. There's so much that's great about it in a non-financial sense. But just because numbers are quant, and this is some of the claims that are

being dealt with in the article, is it worth going to college? Does it in the end make you

more money? Does it even out, especially when you properly account for costs and all that?

A lot of interesting stuff. Plus, why in the world is the economist telling us that there is no

college affordability crisis? Very bizarre. As usual,

you can support the show at patreon.com slash series pod. There you can lose the ads and get occasional

other goodies. Thanks so much to everyone who supports the show. And after this break, we'll be on

with Janessa to figure out why the economist is saying this. And are they right?

Thank you. figure out why the economist is saying this. And are they right? Dr. Janessa Seymour. I'm excited that you're becoming a regular.

Yeah. Really excited to have you.

Awesome. This sounds like a really interesting slash maybe frustrating debunk. How did you get on to this one?

Tell us, tell us the origin story here. Yeah. So I used to be, I don't want to say like a fan of the

economist because that sounds really, really lame. Every issue.

I used to subscribe. I would pay attention to the stuff they wrote. I thought I was getting like pretty good. I don't want to say unbiased. I don't think anybody is truly unbiased. But I would get like fact reporting numbers. Yeah. I didn't associate them with being bad in any way. Yeah, I didn't either. And then it's two years ago, almost to the day, that this article we're going to talk about today came out.

And I read it.

And, well, I'll give you the headline and you'll see why I was immediately confused.

It's American universities have an incentive to seem extortionate.

With the subheading, they are much cheaper than the crisis of

college affordability suggests. Huh. Ah. They have an incentive to seem? Yeah. Why would, hmm. Okay,

well, here's the thing. You know me? I always like, to be fair, trying to make sure I'm getting the best

version of the arguments. I will say that when I went to my university, I did find it weird that it felt like the tuition back then, and this will probably sound quaint, it was like 35,000 a year and that was murder. Like, that was absolute extortion at the time. And it was. But it felt like with everybody, they did a thing where it was like everybody got some amount of help so that it sort of felt like, why not just reduce that number for everyone? Like it feels like you're giving everyone help anyway. So why is it that price? So is it anything like that? Congratulations. You just wrote the article. You're done. We're done. Hooray.

Is it? All right. Yeah. So that was the thought process in my head

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