And that duty is to tell us this. That NY Times story today about the obscene inflation of college tuition is not exactly news to me. But in the context of our economy and personal debt loads–was there some event that precipitated this ballooning? Did student loans get suddenly (or more progressively) easy to get? Have colleges and universities – like their bloated Wall Street brethren – been rapidly increasing costs on the bubble of consumer debt with the expectation that we could just keep going up, up, up? Have state governments been chipping away at public university funding under the same impression (no need to fund, just take out more loans)?

I would like to know these things. Please now go make magic statistics things happen for me. Okay?