You can’t talk about contemporary higher education without talking about money, which is fine, because only fools are even tempted to try. Between 1979 and 2014, the price of tuition and fees at four-year nonprofit US colleges, adjusted for inflation, has jumped 197 percent at private schools and 280 percent at public ones, accelerating faster than housing prices or the cost of medical care or really anything you could compare it to except maybe oil.1

But as anyone who’s seen an infomercial knows, affordability isn’t just about cost, it’s about the repayment terms. Paying $1,800 for a Bowflex up front may cost about the same as eighteen payments of $99.95, but it’s a lot less affordable. When President Obama said in the State of the Union speech, “We worked with lenders to reform student loans, and today, more young people are earning college degrees than ever before,” it sounded like there was a certain causal connection, as if reform had led to a reduction in the higher education debt burden that had freed up more young people to go to college. The reality is closer to the opposite: The more debt there is available, the more “affordable” college is. Washington’s program for higher education accessibility isn’t based on the “No one turned away for lack of funds” logic of a punk show at a Unitarian church; it’s closer to “At no money down, anyone can get behind the wheel of a brand-new Mustang.” This is how the president can call an escalation in average student debt an achievement in accessibility.