Silly Student Debt Comparisons

An article in The Press on student debt has some of the silliest comparisons I have seen.

First of all it proclaims that 13.2% of NZers now hold loans compared to 1992, the first year of the scheme, when it was 1.6%. Well hello!!! Of course there will be far more people with loans after ten years of operation, tha after just one year. It would be impossible for there not to be.

Then it also proclaims that in 1992 the average debt was $3,628 and now it is $14,424. Hmmn so a debt reflecting multiple years of borrowing is greater than a debt of just one year of borrowing. Quick alert the Nobel Prize Committee for Mathemathics.

We deserve better analysis than this.