Slow news day

It's a slow news day, and I don't have a whole lot useful to report. In fact, I'm having trouble just coming up with something for Quote of the Week today. So for the sake of having something to post, I'm gonna get all nitpicky and take Yahoo! to task for some poor journalism (Bad journalism? On the internet!??!? Unheard of!). Sound good? Okay, cool.

From an article irresponsibly entitled "The more debt college students have, the higher their self esteem," Liz Goodwin apparently decided that sensationalizing a headline to get pageviews was more important than actually reporting the story properly. She wrote,

It turns out there is an upside to mounting college debt: self confidence! A new study shows that the higher a young person's debt, the more self-esteem he or she has.

Ohio State University researchers surveyed more than 3,000 adults aged 18 to 34 for the study, which is published in Social Science Research. Their study found that the more debt from college loans and credit cards individuals had in their name, the more control they felt over their lives.

Hey, that's great. College students go to school, think it's a great investment in their future (because they've been told so for their entire adolescent lives), and as a result they're brimming with confidence. Cool. Whether or not there's actually a causal link between the debt itself and the self-esteem isn't really discussed here--the correlation is all we're given.

But the real problem is Goodwin's burying of the lead, which comes next:

There is, however, a catch: People over the age of 28 started to show signs of stress and worry about their debt. The downshift in debtors' moods stems from the ongoing growth of their debt obligations over time--though it is of course also true that adults have a general propensity to worry more as they age.

Yeah, that's a pretty significant catch. In fact, I'd argue that it's the real finding of the study. Young people are saddled with debt without fully realizing the implications, and only a decade later when they're actually charged with paying that bill do they begin to question whether they made the right decision.

Doesn't that seem like an important takeaway here, if not the most important one? But no, instead we get a "debt makes people happy" headline, which is so maddeningly obvious and stupid that you might as well write a "Breaking News: Alcohol makes people drunk" headline, ignoring the fact that alcohol also makes people hungover.

Whatever. We'll see how confident all these students are after they've graduated, struggled to find a job, and realized (only too late) that their student loan debt is, in fact, nondischargeable. Maybe the students should do a better job of reading the fine print; maybe Yahoo! "reporters" should too.

[Yahoo!]
(h/t Yves Smith)