One-in-five American households have student loan debt.

19% of American households have student loan debt, according to CNN/Money referencing the Pew Research Center. This is up from 15% only three years earlier.

And, of course, depending on how poor you are correlates to how likely you're to acquire that student loan debt--as CNN offers us with this delightful graph:

And yet 19% is supposed to be high--which is a bit of a downer, because I'm pretty certain that 19% is all of my friends.



Just a little quibble with the graph:
How come CNN labels the top fifth as richest but labels the poorest fifth as lowest? Are they afraid to use the word poorest? But are these people not the poorest? And doesn't that work in conjunction with labeling the top fifth as richest? Yeah, yeah, I might be arguing semantics here, but words are words--and it seems CNN is afraid of some.


Graph: CNN/MONEY