[Spooky23]

College isn’t the issue, it’s the lack of political will to make the political and social objective sustainable.

An English or art history major has a lot to add to the world, both in terms of enlightenment and analytical ability. The problem is that it isn’t worth the debt load, and the incentive structure for tuition guarantees bad outcomes.

My dad went to City College in NYC for free in the late 60s and received a great education. His dad was a widower with 5 kids who ran a neighborhood bar.

The modern version of my dad would be either in the army by necessity or saddled with massive debt even in a public school.

The societal cost of the current situation is awful — wage slave milennials who will never own a home or have a opportunity to accumulate wealth.

[autokad]

> "wage slave milennials who will never own a home or have a opportunity to accumulate wealth."

not with the way they spend it. i graduated in '02 with 35k dept, couldn't find work till '05. started off at 29k doing tech support. But I didnt travel, I -never- ate out, always tried to keep my spending to almost nothing. two years before i bought my house, i lived in a micro apartment for 400/month to save money. bought a house by 2013.

I dont think I qualify as being a millennial, but I do respect the hardships they faced, as I graduated during the 2001 recession and was smacked with the housing crisis as soon as I was starting to get on my feet. delayed employment and years of low wages have made it almost impossible for me to save enough to retire.

however,

when gainfully employed people say they cant afford a house, they very often mean: "I dont want to adjust my spending, and I dont want to be flexible for where I want to live."

[closeparen]

This has more to do with urbanization/centralization than with spending habits. A handful of firms headquartered in global cities are increasingly eating the world; this is making those cities expensive by increasing the importance of living in one of them.

All the San Francisco complainers could likely find living-wage jobs and houses in what's left of America's small towns and stagnant cities, and choose not to. You're right. But IT jobs only exist in Middle America because the Bay Area and Seattle cloud companies haven't gotten to them yet. If you want to be on the forefront of your industry and on the right side of history, you probably need to do it from a place where homeownership is growing further and further out of reach to mere professionals.

In those cities, the few thousand dollars a year you could save by cutting the restaurant meals and travel don't make a meaningful difference in your ability to amass as $200k down payment or plop down a $1m cash offer (increasingly necessary to win a bid).