100% agree. Also, to a young adult, student loans are a nigh-irresistible way to get away from your parents and gain independence, while worrying about the costs later.
Their parents and an entire propaganda machine coming from the school system, local, and federal governments.
Children were told "you can be anything you want to be" and also "in order to get a good job you have to go to college" which, in effect, forced children who otherwise didn't need to go to college, to go to college.
In the same way a child cannot consent to sex, a child cannot fight social pressure coming from every institution they have access to. Your insistence on the word force is manipulative, pointless, and in bad faith.
It's like birthing an animal in captivity and setting up a snare trap outside the only exit to their cage and then claiming you are hunting when they step on it. Truly disgusting.
I was told such things too. I also can process numbers. I knew that taking on an extra cost I could not pay would not be worth it without a guarantee of a high paying job, which is not something offered by going to school.
The younger generations certainly seem capable of that reasoning. They aren't taking on nearly as many student loans.
> I knew that taking on an extra cost I could not pay would not be worth it without a guarantee of a high paying job, which is not something offered by going to school.
Except this was exactly what was offered. Schools used to brag about placement rates. This message came from your parents, the staff at your school, etc.
Setting up, I repeat, a literal trap for children to fall into, and then getting on this stupid high horse about how you didn't fall for it. I cannot begin to express how depraved that concept is, and I know you can't begin to comprehend it. Maybe one day you will.
> The younger generations certainly seem capable of that reasoning. They aren't taking on nearly as many student loans.
That is because they have the mistakes of 2 previous generations as an example and the rhetoric has died down dramatically.
The trap the schools set is nasty. But it meets the nasty expectations people had that the economic boom of the 40s-50s, where everyone could just keep going to college and getting a high paying job and living it good forever. Some lessons you can only learn the hard way.