A while back, the odd fact emerged that, at least by some measures, student-aid debt exceeds credit-card debt. Although this development is in large part the product of the decline in credit-card debt occasioned by consumer response to the financial crisis—an event quite independent of student borrowing—it put a kind of punctuation mark on widespread and rather diffuse worries about student-aid indebtedness. A search for the phrase “student debt exceeds credit card debt” yields 2,460,000 hits on Google. This explosion of interest may qualify as a minor example of what Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran have labeled an “availability cascade,” in which the salience of a particular example gives it disproportionate weight in people’s thinking.
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