If I asked you what family costs have risen the fastest over the past decade, what would you say?

Gas Prices! Nope.

Health insurance! Not even close. 

No family expense has risen faster than the cost of sending a child to college. 

The graph below tells a vivid story of skyrocketing tuition rates, mushrooming room and board costs, and expanding fees. 

Since the beginning of the last decade, the cost of college tuition and fees has leapt 100 percent. 

We carp about gas prices, and wring our hands over health care costs, but the inflation rate for those expenses is dwarfed by college

costs.

Health care is cause for concern, with costs rising 50 percent since 2000.  Transportation costs are frustrating, up 30 percent since the dawn of the decade. But college costs are growing at more than twice the rate of inflation.

And this is nothing new.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics looks back as far as 1978.   You would have to spend $10 today to get the same value for

your tuition dollar as $1 spent in 1978!

It's why President Obama will have a highly engaged audience when he brings up tuition inflation. 

And the problem only got worse in 2011. 

Tuition and fees at public universities jumped another 8.3 percent last year. Students at non-profit private universities experienced a 4.5 percent inflation rate.  And we reached a disturbing milestone.

Student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt as the single greatest liability burdening ordinary Americans.

My young co-workers will be paying off student loans long past the point where I was buying a home, a new car, or putting money away for retirement when I was their age. 

It's a huge drag on the economy.

I'll await President Obama's solutions, and just importantly, see if his opponents are as willing to confront this nightmare.  If he truly has the political resolve to see this through, there will be grateful students and parents---and nervous administrators and faculty.