[randomdata]

> but if you don't have one then you don't even have a chance of making enough savings to afford housing, healthcare, education for your children, et cetera.

Where does this idea come from?

According to the OECD, only 48% of American adults have a post-secondary education. I find it hard to believe that 52% of Americans truly cannot afford housing, healthcare, education for children, etc. I might even bet that the 52% have an easier time (especially with shelter), as there seems to be a correlation between the desire to live in an expensive city and having post-secondary attainment.

Additionally, wages are stagnant. The rapid rise in post-secondary attainment mentioned by the parent has done nothing to increase incomes among the workforce. The article points out that incomes have been on the decline for those without a post-secondary education. But misses the obvious: As colleges select for the most successful people, the most successful people without a degree who brought up the average in previous years now belong to the college group.

People can't set their expectations lower, but they can set them higher by not falling prey to misleading interpretations of the data surrounding college. The data is abundantly clear that there has been no advantage in the significant rise in post-secondary attainment. If anything, people are worse off now because of it.

[InclinedPlane]

The median age in the US is 38. Half of the population is older than that, since 27% of the population is under 18 that means nearly 70% of the adult population is over 38, about 45% is over 50, and about a quarter is over 60. Those older folks had the benefit of higher wage jobs in their early careers, and were able to build their careers, job experience histories, and income levels much faster than later generations. Additionally, because of the much lower costs of housing they were able to build their wealth at a much faster rate.

Someone who is 60 years old or older today (which again makes up fully 1/4 of the adults in the US) would have seen average (nominal) wages of about 12k/yr and would have been able to jump into a mortgage only a few years after entering the job market, on a home price of just 60-100k. With a 30 year mortgage they would today be living with a fully paid off house worth easily half a million dollars, and would have had one to two decades of being able to plow their former mortgage payments into investments. Those people have no problem paying for housing, healthcare, children, etc.

It's folks who were born after 1980 who face lower wage jobs with higher requirements, higher costs of education, higher housing costs, higher medical costs, etc. And face an uphill battle in terms of building their careers, increasing their income, and building their wealth.

As to your point about college educations, it is much more difficult to obtain a high paying job without college. And study after study show that college educations result in higher incomes. You might claim that colleges select for the most successful people, which skews the results, but that doesn't change the fact that most desirable and well paying jobs still list college educations as requirements.

[randomdata]

> on a home price of just 60-100k.

As a millennial, I bought my home for $120k. I'm not sure if your figures are real or nominal, but even if they are real, at worst we're talking $20k more. That's not life ending. Food is way less expensive now. I will easily save $20k on food during the lifespan of my home when compared to what they had to spend, not to mention that interest costs are much cheaper today.

The housing issue is vastly overblown, except in certain major centres. But if you have a job that compensates for the higher cost of housing, what's the problem? You cannot expect to have more money than someone outside of the city. The economy and its quest for equilibrium would never allow that over the long term, although there may be short term opportunities now and again. Economically speaking, your higher paying job must, on average, come with higher expenses so that you don't make more money than people with low-income jobs in low-cost areas.

If you don't have one of those jobs that makes up for the cost of housing, why are you there? There are houses everywhere.

> it is much more difficult to obtain a high paying job without college.

A common misconception that it matters, but a higher paying job doesn't mean anything. The goal is to maximize income less expenses. If a job is higher paying, but you have higher living costs due to the job being in a high cost city, and needing a high cost college degree, then you're not necessarily further ahead.

If you are further ahead than you would be without, what's the issue? You're literally further ahead. The costs are a non-issue. The costs are recouped and then some.

> And study after study show that college educations result in higher incomes.

Not quite. Study after study shows that successful people are successful in college and in the workplace. This is not the same as college resulting in higher income. Handing a college degree to someone who has a crippling mental disability is not going to benefit from it in the workplace. They are going to struggle no matter what, just as successful people will succeed no matter what.

If we took it to the logical extreme and assumed everyone had a post-secondary education, the jobs wouldn't change. Someone would still be flipping burgers at McDonalds, someone would be driving trucks around the country, someone would be writing software, and so on. And they're not going to magically pay more just because you have a degree. Why would they? When have you ever offered the burger flipper at McDonalds more money because they happened to have a degree? College degrees have no bearing on the job market.

I see how it is easy to mix them up, but the data is abundantly clear that it is the latter and not the former. After all, incomes are stagnant and have been for 50-some-odd years. If incomes were increasing with post-secondary attainment, they couldn't also be stagnant.