What have you not done for four years? Exercise? Visit your great-aunt? Pay taxes?

New data from the US Census shows that old folks are becoming ever more likely to need to move into your spare bedroom: "The median level of debt among households led by someone 65 and older..rose nearly 120% between 2000 and 2011 from roughly $12,000 to $26,000, due largely to rising mortgage debt."

Just when the stock market recovers and public optimism returns and you start to lose faith in the power of American capitalism to constantly repeat its past mistakes in the form of foreseeable boom-and-bust cycles that always end in massive losses, the system steps up to reinforce your belief in humanity's fundamental unwillingness to learn from past mistakes, ever. Hello, looming student loan meltdown!

Your grandparents, enterprising and hardscrabble dirt farmers that they were, could probably work their way through college with nothing more than a job as a soda jerk at the Moderne Tyme Coca-Cola Soda and Sweetes Fountainne and Heroin Dispensary. Now, though, you would have to actually be a heroin trafficker in order to pay your own way through college. The latest figures on the humongous US student debt load are out. They are not improving.

Making fun of going to art school as a futile and self-indulgent formula for regret is like... even more cliched than making fun of law school. Unfortunately, the latest economic data confirms that everyone must continue with this trite (and, frankly, unfunny) form of mockery until the situation on the ground changes.

Last October, billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer tracked the course of a Argentine navy ship, Libertad, as it crossed the globe. When it docked in Ghana, his firm, NML Capital, convinced a judge there to hold the ship in port until Argentina could pay its 1.3 billion debt to him, debt still owed from when the Argentine economy completely collapsed in 2001.

To the litany of disastrous news about our nation's huge student debt burden, we can add this: more and more of that debt is being held by the borrowers least able to pay it back.

Put down your comically oversized bags with $$$ scrawled on the side, slip off your burglarin' shoes and drop the crowbar: the trillion-dollar coin is no more, and with it, your dreams of one last big heist just to see if the team still has some of the old magic. From the Washington Post:

Mighty timely New York Times story this morning about colleges, institutions created to set bright young people on a course of lifetime penury. What with all the attention paid to the fact that students are drowning in debt due to student loans, we often overlook the financial situations of the schools themselves. How are they doing?

"The definition of a college president is someone who lives in a big house and begs for money," goes an old line that college presidents like to say to appear self-deprecating. Fortunately, college presidents are very well compensated for their efforts.

If thinking about the dangerous student debt bubble stresses you out, well, just don't read this.

Look at this guy, Opanin Gyaami, right here: he's a dentist, he's 71 years old, and he's still repaying his student loans, from the 1980s! When you see a wacky case like this, it's natural to ask yourself, "Ignoring the fact that Mr. Gyaami is a bad example because his debt is largely due to the fact that he ignored repayment notices for an extended period of time, can we use this wacky story as a 'news hook' to humanize a larger, newsworthy trend?" The answer is: "Yes we can." The trend is that your parents are probably broke, thanks to you.

The student debt crisis is overhyped! Unless you're young, poor, female, or nonwhite.

The University of Phoenix is shutting down 115 of its bloodsucking fake college locations in the U.S., about half of the total number of centers of flimflammery. This may be seen as part of the larger trend of the decline of so-called "for profit colleges," which is a good thing, in the sense that these schools are best not at education, but at sucking money out of desperate people who can scarcely afford it.

To briefly recap: America is currently in a student loan bubble, holding an unimaginably huge amount of student debt, as delinquency of loan payments swells, and even the well-off question whether they can afford college. It would seem, then, rather obvious that student loan debt is too big. Surprise: the people who control the higher education spigot—college admissions directors—disagree!

This WSJ story today on the rising cost of college for the affluent is a cavalcade of shocking statistics about our current student debt crisis: the average price of a four-year college has more than doubled in real terms since 1985; three million households owe $50k or more in student loans, a number that's tripled since 1989, inflation-adjusted. When even the golf course set can't afford college, you know we have a problem.

The funniest (meaning "most horrific and devastating") thing about student loans is that, thanks to some nifty lobbying, you cannot get rid of them in bankruptcy. They just stick around like one of the more bothersome STDs no matter how impoverished you become. But that might change, a bit! Which would be major news for you broke, educated people.

The student loan bubble that threatens to envelop America is a truly remarkable form of penury: your debt ruins you financially, and you may never even reap any benefits from it, thanks to our nation's horrible economy! And now, a second, even more devious peril is becoming clear: you could still be repaying your student loans when it comes time to help your kids get their own student loans.

America is currently embroiled in a student loan bubble and when it pops, wooo buddy. *Makes whistling sound, gazes off into distance*... let's just say that I hope you can use some lacquer and a long stick to turn your college diploma into some sort of edged weapon to fight off the starving graduate student food mobs. Let's just leave it at that. Let's not get explicit, except to say that banks will literally take your mother's home if you try to not pay them back, so, you know, the weapon thing is maybe the way to go.

Kids these days don't know about money. The problem, as laid out in this USA Today story, is devastatingly simple: today's high school students can't pass simple tests of financial literacy, even though they will most likely be heavily in debt and facing poor job prospects within a decade. Furthermore, most states don't teach kids anything about the topic.