private-student-loansGimmeTheScoop‘s recent graphic about Private Student Loans has gotten alot of publicity and mileage, but a detailed look at it gets a bit confusing.  Neal Levene of SimpleComplexity takes a very in-depth look at it and finds numerous problems ranging from poor aesthetic choices to just plain misleading data.  For example:

I don’t like that the left chart is per student data and the right is for the whole industry. How many students were there receiving loans? Is the issue that the number of students increased? Are loans to people at private colleges included in the data at the right? It is suggested by the graphic that the left and right are correlated, but there are many alternate hypotheses.

It’s an excellent critique, and towards the end he shows an alternate chart (made from data he derived from the existing graph) which does a far better job showing the information.

via Private Student Loans – A Critique — Simple Complexity.