During the expansion of the housing bubble, lenders felt protected because they could repackage risky loans as mortgage-backed securities, which sold briskly to a pious market that believed housing prices could only increase… the education sector has its equivalent: the Student Loan Asset-Backed Security (or, as they’re known in the industry, SLABS)…

But the rapid growth in tuition is mystifying in value terms; no one could argue convincingly the quality of instruction or the market value of a degree has increased ten-fold in the past four decades (though this hasn’t stopped some from trying). So why would universities raise tuition so high so quickly?

Indeed, emerging neuroimaging-based evidence indicates that adolescence may also be a special time for learning from social experiences and this hints at the opening and closing of periods of increased sensitivity to environmental influence (Nelson and Guyer, in press). For example, while most other regions of the brain are influenced by atypical adversity in early in life, the prefrontal cortex appears more vulnerable to such experiences when they occur during adolescence (Andersen et al., 2008).