Student Loan Debt Triples Overnight

TRIPLED!! Or so you’d be led to believe if you were in the room at #WCET11 when Josh Jarrett of the Gates Foundation was speaking about High Quality Online Institutions that Scale. Apparently he said something that led to this tweet.

Which was then re-tweeted. Then I saw it and tried to set the record straight (falling on deaf ears, no doubt), as follows:

I learn a great deal from my Twitter network every day. But I also see a great deal of misinformation – mostly from the twitter feed at conferences.

For the record, student loan debt hasn’t yet topped the 1 trillion dollar mark – although it is expected to do so before the end of the year. The current (10/28/11) amount is $952+ billion, according the the Student Loan Debt Clock.

“Alarming stats” indeed! Alarming because they’re just not even close to the truth.