I don't understand his points about the Princeton graphic. from the Princeton page he links to:
> *The projected budget increase in the financial aid program will continue significant enhancements the University has made over the past 12 years, including replacing all required loans with grants that do not need to be repaid. This year the average grant for a student on financial aid is $36,000. These efforts have dramatically increased the economic diversity of Princeton's student body. The 60 percent of this year's freshman class on financial aid is a striking change from the class of 2001 -- the last class admitted before the enhancements to the aid program -- when 38 percent of the freshmen were on aid.
The infographic being criticized in the article, an infographic trying to make a point about a public policy position, may not have used the most meaningful fact in the first place. If the issue is cost of imprisonment per inmate per year, then the correct comparison is to the spending per full-time student per year, which at Princeton and several other universities is higher than the billed full list price tuition, because Princeton has other sources of revenue besides tuition.
Spending per full-time student figures are collected by the United States federal government, by law, and are reported on the College Results website maintained by a nonprofit organization.
AFTER EDIT: While doing other things away from my computer, I thought about how the submitted article relates to the culture aspired to here on Hacker News. In February 2009, Paul Graham wrote an article "What I've Learned from Hacker News"
looking back on the first two years of Hacker News. He wrote then, "There are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs to avoid: bad stories and bad comments." He thought at that time that the steps Hacker News takes to keep out bad stories have been largely successful, and to this date there haven't been any big technical changes (certainly never downvotes on submissions) to screen out bad stories. The author of the submitted article says, "Think before you link" in her example of an infographic about the problem described in the article, and goes on to say, "So before you pick up that infographic, give it a good, hard look." This is the desired culture here on HN. Early in my 1132 days of participation here on HN, I asked more experienced participants if the expectation here is that links are submitted for comment, even if the submitter disagrees with the link, or if submitting a link is an implicit endorsement that the link has at least minimal quality. The participants who kindly replied to my question overwhelmingly said that I and participants here in general should just submit links that they endorse as worth a read, not crap links to stir up comments of disagreement. I agree with the author of the submitted link here that infographics are too eye-catching and resist efforts at fact-checking, and that is is worthwhile to check the underlying sources and facts before passing on a link to an infographic. Way back in 1954 the author of How to Lie with Statistics
> *The projected budget increase in the financial aid program will continue significant enhancements the University has made over the past 12 years, including replacing all required loans with grants that do not need to be repaid. This year the average grant for a student on financial aid is $36,000. These efforts have dramatically increased the economic diversity of Princeton's student body. The 60 percent of this year's freshman class on financial aid is a striking change from the class of 2001 -- the last class admitted before the enhancements to the aid program -- when 38 percent of the freshmen were on aid.