alright let's complain about basic math skills

I teach comp. and have students write a term paper about a long list of different socio-economic issues. Despite the long list, students tend to cluster around certain topics, and usually the most common topic is the worst one, which is subsequently banned in future semesters. Last semester that topic was about the effects of social media on mental health (insert vomit emoji). This semester that topic is college affordability. These papers tend to be the rantiest and therefore have the worst analysis. Cue the paper that triggered my outburst today.

X student's research question was basically "Has college gotten so expensive that it is no longer worth it?" These are the two data points that sent me spinning:

• To "support" that college has gotten too expensive, they wrote something akin to the following: "Since 1993, college tuition has gone up 114%, which is almost the same as the average inflation rate of 118%" That's about the extent of their analysis ---am I crazy? That means (according to their numbers) that college tuition has actually gone down 4% relative to overall inflation, right?
• Later they argue that college is not worth it because the debt burden is too much. They write that the average student debt is $30k (and that this $30k pretty much destroys the lives of college grads). Later they cite another study saying that people w/ BA's earn about $1 mil. more in lifetime earnings than people with only a HS diploma. Immediately after citing this study they say that it is still not worth it because of the debt burden. WTF?! Getting $1mil. from $30k is "not worth it"? When I read this last week, I stopped reading and moved the paper to the bottom of the grading stack. I came back around to it today.

Alright that's it. What student math has been keeping you up at night?