Five big trends that have changed in the last few years

In which I pay attention to the world so you don't have to.

"Sharp Turn" by crudmucosa, CC BY 2.0.

“Up over down under the plunder is new, and so is the thunder that wrinkles the blue” — Pogo

People like me are called “opinion writers”, and opining on stuff is certainly part of what we do. But when I describe my job to my friends, I tell them it’s really more like being an open-source CIA analyst — what I mainly do is to take in a huge amount of information from news and research and social media and try to make sense of what’s going on in the world, then package my reports for a general audience.

A big part of that is just staying on top of current trends. One thing I’ve noticed is that when major economic storylines shift, it generally takes even most educated people several years to realize it. Sometimes that makes me frustrated, but it really shouldn’t — after all, most people don’t have time to sit around reading news and papers all day. When the world changes, it’s my job to point out those changes.

So every once in a while I like to do a roundup like this one. Here are five big and important new trends in the U.S. and the world over the past three to ten years that seem not to have made it into our collective consciousness yet.

1. College tuition is going down now

For decades, it has been common knowledge that college relentlessly gets more and more expensive every year. Graphs of college tuition, with or without room and board, were just one-way lines. The price of college featured prominently in graphs of how services in America have become unaffordable.

Well, for the last two years, the price of college has been going down:

Source: College Board

It’s tempting to write this off as a pandemic blip that will soon be reversed, but the drop has only accelerated since the pandemic ended.