GOOD Magazine provided a chart recently about 'ballooning' debt incurred by graduating college seniors with more than $40,000 in student federal loans. OK, so I can't seem to find where they provide a writeup on any of the content of this chart, but this chart is just terribly done.

First of all, it's way too large to display the whole chart on a typical 17" or 19" monitor, even at a high resolution.

Second, the increasingly larger balloons in the graphic cause the eye to perceive an almost exponential increase in the number of students with large student loan debt year over year, when really the increase is only about 6-10% per year. In fact, the graphic makes the last "2006" balloon look at least 4 times larger (in mere diameter of the balloon, let alone perceived volume) when in fact, the difference between the year 2000 and 2006 in this graphic is only an increase of 72%. While 72% appears to be a large increase in student loan indebtedness in just 6 years, and it is, it's certainly nowhere near the 400% (or more) increase that the eye perceives from this graphic.

Lastly, the title of this chart misleads the viewer. It states: "The total student federal loan debt in the United States is $492 billion." The chart then provides years and numbers of students (in the balloons), but absolutely NO further relationship is made to the dollars listed in the heading. That misleads one into confusion about what the numbers in the balloons represent. In fact, those numbers only represent a count, by year, of students with more than $40,000 in student federal debt, NOT the total amount of debt that they have. Additionally, the little stick figures hanging from the balloon do not represent a more statistically accurate picture of the data, because if you charted each year out in a program like Microsoft Excel, you would see that each year has more students with >$40k in school debt than the year before, and this is not reflected by the positions of the stick figures.

Fancy graphical artistry does not help this chart one bit. If anything, it helps to promote an alarmist, preconceived notion by whoever commissioned this chart to be drawn that something must be done IMMEDIATELY about the rising costs of a college degree in the US. I have no problem with that attitude, but I have a serious problem with the deception of the public with the use of incredibly inaccurate statistics as seen in this chart. Be careful when you see fancy charts in 'hip' magazines, books, or newspapers - they may not (and usually aren't) telling the truth about the data being presented.