I get so tired of the "you Boomers" finger pointing. I don't want this to sound like a "we walked five miles through the driving snow to get to school tale", but I strongly believe most would be far better served taking active responsibility for their own futures rather than blaming others.
I occasionally remind my children that until the fourth grade I lived in an 1100 square foot house in South Louisiana that had no AC. My father at the time was a college professor at Nichols State. I remember going out to a restaurant once in that time - it was such novel adventure. We never ever had take out. I did ride a school bus, so I did not have to walk to school. Other than go to grandparents' or an aunts' home, we never took vacations.
Upon moving to Lake Charles in time for the fifth grade, my parents purchased a 1500 square foot home with central air - I never realized I was hot before. Following my father's death in the nineteen eighties, my mother remained in that house until having to enter assisted living in her nineties. My father became a tenured professor, then the head of the history department, and eventually Dean of Liberal Arts but we never went out to dinner. Our vacations continued to be trips to visit family. In fact the only two vacations that I know my mother and father ever took prior to his death was one to visit me while stationed in Germany and another to Arkansas.
My basic college degree was covered by an ROTC scholarship and a lot of hard work. Neither I nor my parents borrowed anything. No it wasn't the greatest degree from the greatest college but not quite twenty years later I held a fellowship at the Walsh School of International Relations, Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown.
In the military, Nancy and I largely only went to unit functions and the like until I reached the rank of major. Then too, we were always very careful, because we had two kids approaching college age. She did not work, largely because we were constantly on the move and she was the anchor of our family. When our 17-year-old daughter arrived in the DC area with us, it was her fourteenth move and third high school.
Neither our son nor our daughter accumulated a dime of student loan debt because we absorbed those costs at the expense of other things.
It wasn't until I entered the corporate world, after a thirty-year apprenticeship that we suddenly had true disposable income. But the only way we were able to successfully enter that world was because of the sacrifices we made to reach a station that allowed me to compete for such opportunities.
Millennials should feel free to use there income however they wish. But spare me the finger pointing. Every Uber-eats, restaurant, streaming subscription, paid AP, craft beer, exotic coffee order, Amazon order, and credit card charge is direct theft from their future. And as
@rookhawk correctly points out, every liberal arts degree without solid plans for a follow-on professional degree may be the greatest self-inflicted wound of all.
