My first job was in a recession and the pay was lousy. I did it because I had to get work experience. I didn’t blame the greatest generation for my problems. It didn’t even occur to me!
/bingo
I had less than $400 of student debt to pay off (as a dropout), and the country was still mired in the disaster of the Carter years, with those lovely double-digit interest rates. I was lucky in that I was the youngest kid and my parents were hitting their best-paid years (by far) despite the fact that neither had a college ed or pension plan beyond social security and (by that time) a few years of IRA savings made possible by those higher earnings.
They were smart people, yet they were irreparably Democrat.
The fact is, higher ed is really just higher bills because the tuition costs exploded — twenty years after I grad high school, or rather 20 years after I started college, the credit hour cost had grown tenfold, and the university I’d attended for a while went from terms (three a year, plus a truncated summer term) to semesters (two a year, plus a truncated summer semester). I suppose the alibi now is, “we have to work an extra two weeks, and had to give up a whole term of pay.” Waaah.