Salon's Broadsheet has a piece analyzing the current student loan crisis that has been grossly exacerbated by the current economic recession. According to the Cato Institute, students today are taking out an average of $3,650 per year to pay for college -- more than double the figure from the early 1990s:

As Neal McCluskey, associate director at the Cato Institute, pointed out this week in a New York Times debate on student debt, in the 1990-91 school year -- the year before I started college -- the average full-time student received $2,640 in grant aid and $1,548 in student loans. Last year, grant aid was $4,656 and the average loan per student per year was $3,650. Over that same period, total charges, adjusted for inflation, at four-year public colleges rose 63 percent and 55 percent at four-year private colleges. The average graduate of a four-year public college in 2007 went into the working world with $20,000 in debt; for graduates of private colleges, it was $25,000. But as other Times readers have chimed in, poor and middle-class students at Ivys or professional schools can expect to walk away with $60,000, $110,000 or $160,00 in loans. Given that tuition, fees and estimated costs for a year at Harvard hit close to the average American household income of $50,000, even those who come from families with a healthy income will walk away with hefty loans.

It's disgusting that a "public" education in the United States come with a price tag soaring far past inflation into terrain only accessible by the wealthy. I can tell you that the students I teach at the University of Michigan are not representative of the state of Michigan -- a grossly disproportionate number of them are the wealthy children from Detroit's McMansion suburbs (of which there must be a dozen). They turn in scrapbook projects filled with pictures of their family cruises and glamorous trips to exotic locations. I don't blame them for their family's wealth. But I certainly blame the system that makes them think that it was by sheer virtue of their hard work and intelligence that got them admitted to this university.