OK, all that data I gave you last week was fun, but let’s get back to the serious business of snark.  I know you’ve all been waiting to hear the winner of the “Worst Back-to-School Story” competition.  And so, without further ado:

Stories reporting on the CIBC World Markets report about how students were choosing the “wrong” subjects received nominations from a number of you.  However, while these were indeed irritating, I don’t feel that they really achieved the level of awfulness commensurate with this award.

Runner-up was a Globe online piece by Zander Sherman, who, if you’ll recall, wrote a seriously terrible book on education about a year ago.  His prescription for improving higher education’s real problems was to send it back to the twelfth century, with Latin, Greek and hazing for all.  It’s not clear if he was attempting satire, given that his antipathy is to compulsory education; but if satire was his aim, it didn’t work.

But this year’s winner, without a doubt, was Gary Mason’s article, University Students: Another Day Smarter But Deeper in Debt.  Slathered with inaccurate, misleading, or totally out of context data, it really stood out from the field.

Here’s my annotated guide to this wretched article:

Bravo Gary, and thanks to all our contestants.  Your contributions make the back-to-school period what it is today.