you and your econ major pals drank cocaine for five years and expect to be rewarded for it?

Most of that crowd had their parents pay for college. The people getting crushed by student debt are often the ones who worked through college, have been working since, and still are getting fucked by usurious loans.

It’s not an either/or situation, too. We can both pay people living wages and not crush them with debt.

At the face of it the PMC hardship mythology about how they deserve their privilege because they took an education sounds plausible in isolation. After all going to college takes a certain level of skill and talent and you have to work to get a degree. Also college students have less income than their peers of equal age who got an apprenticeship and went to trade school and who are buying homes when college students are still living on ramen.

But the moment you compare it to other positions in society the idea that going to college is uniquely burdensome and demanding is laughable. Going to school is awesome. You get to have a community with other people your age, you get to learn about something that interests you in depth and to a large degree you control your own schedule. Given the opportunity who wouldn’t choose this over say, slaving away in the panopticon of Amazon’s dark satanic warehouses?

It is not everyone who has the interest to do book learning but all young people ought to be able to go to “college” and spend the first years of their adult lives maturing and focusing on developing skills rather than generating profits, whether these skills enables them to be brain surgeons, carpenters or florists.

The divide between college educated and non-college educated workers is bullshit and should be broken down.