It’s back-to-school time, which inevitably means we’re about to get a raft of journalists dubbing various things as “trends” (step forward, the Ottawa Citizen). Here are three that we should just ditch right now:

(1) Rising Costs Mean More Students are Working. Wrong, at least if we’re talking about the last ten years. In the mid-80s, the student in-school employment rate jumped from about 30% to 40%, where it stayed through to the end of the 1990s, when it jumped another few points to just over 45%. It has stayed there ever since.

(2) Rising Costs Mean Students are Working Longer Hours. Wrong again. Average working hours have bounced back and forth between 16 and 17 hours per week ever since 1997. There is absolutely no change at all over the past fifteen years.

The bottom line here is: recession? What recession? The student labour market doesn’t move in tune with the economy. It’s rock solid, with trend lines so flat you could shoot pool on them, regardless of the state of the economy. What seems to move it are large increases in participation; when the system goes through a major expansion (as it did in the first half of the 80s and again at the end of the 90s), it takes on a new group of students who – for whatever reason – are less likely to work.

(3) Rising Costs Mean Education is Less Affordable. The standard story will note that tuition and fees are currently running a little under $6,000, whereas in 2000 it was about $4,500. Hey! That’s a 33% increase! Must be a crisis!

Well, no. As we pointed out a couple of years ago, there have been some considerable increases in tax credits as well. And, of course, family incomes have been rising, too. Just looking quickly at data from the last decade, it seems that real net tuition (i.e., after tax credits) has increased by about 19% since 2000. Over the same period, average after-tax family income for two-parent families with children has risen by 16%.

In other words, net tuition as a percentage of family income has increased by 3% over a decade. Not much of a headline, is it?