Should we fear the $1 trillion student loan figure?

The most popular number in higher education today is $1 trillion—the total amount of outstanding student loan debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It’s big and scary; the size of figure typically used for wars and national budgets, and easily encapsulates a set of middle class fears about the cost of college. Not surprisingly, the figure is ubiquitous in the media and helps produce alarming charts, such as this one from a piece in Mother Jones about different plans to deal with student loan interest rates: 

There’s just one problem—the number isn’t necessarily the boogeyman it’s made out to be. That’s because the $1 trillion loan balance is an aggregate number. That means the issue isn’t whether it’s growing, but why it’s increasing.

Is the outstanding student loan balance going up because more people are borrowing and people that do borrow are taking on more money? Absolutely. But it’s also going up because there are just more people in college in any given year. About 6 million more as the chart below shows: