…And then they mostly couldn’t be bothered to actually get college degrees despite how cheap they were, yet still ended up with good careers capable of supporting entire households with only one person working anyway.
Despite his cynicism, even Bernie manages to understate the problem here!
Just throwing out there, this was one generation out of however many to the dawn of time that was able to do this. And they did it on the backs of the hundreds of thousands of people that fought, starved and died to get unions established. For the vast majority of history, if you could work you worked man, woman & child because if you didn’t your family starved. Then people fought for generations to get unions established and they finally did it and one single generation got the advantages of it before the next generation decided they didn’t need no stinking unions as they were working white collar jobs and here we are. We’re not standing together so we’re falling together.
To be fair, the reason every job nowadays requires a college degree is because so many people went to college. Before that, the boomers were coasting on with barely a high school degree but they tought that by pushing their kids to get college degrees, they can help them achieve more wealth (and by extension, themselves). This combined with the fact that they basically directly contributed to the erosion of unions (it was a very common thing that an employer/union leader paid off by a company offered boomers a deal where they get a higher pension but it would not apply to anyone born after 2000 or something; of course they took those deals because they are the “me me me generation”, who has the foresight of a hampster) and then they are deliberately oblivious to the fact that young people can’t achieve anything career wise because they don’t have strong unions backing them up. No unions, no better pay, no better working conditions, no guarantied good deal on pension and insurance, etc etc.
As a side note, in the US at least there is a reason many advise people to just learn a trade instead of getting a college degree. Trades are in high demand, has been for a good while and probably will be for decades.
…And then they mostly couldn’t be bothered to actually get college degrees despite how cheap they were, yet still ended up with good careers capable of supporting entire households with only one person working anyway.
Despite his cynicism, even Bernie manages to understate the problem here!
Just throwing out there, this was one generation out of however many to the dawn of time that was able to do this. And they did it on the backs of the hundreds of thousands of people that fought, starved and died to get unions established. For the vast majority of history, if you could work you worked man, woman & child because if you didn’t your family starved. Then people fought for generations to get unions established and they finally did it and one single generation got the advantages of it before the next generation decided they didn’t need no stinking unions as they were working white collar jobs and here we are. We’re not standing together so we’re falling together.
To be fair, the reason every job nowadays requires a college degree is because so many people went to college. Before that, the boomers were coasting on with barely a high school degree but they tought that by pushing their kids to get college degrees, they can help them achieve more wealth (and by extension, themselves). This combined with the fact that they basically directly contributed to the erosion of unions (it was a very common thing that an employer/union leader paid off by a company offered boomers a deal where they get a higher pension but it would not apply to anyone born after 2000 or something; of course they took those deals because they are the “me me me generation”, who has the foresight of a hampster) and then they are deliberately oblivious to the fact that young people can’t achieve anything career wise because they don’t have strong unions backing them up. No unions, no better pay, no better working conditions, no guarantied good deal on pension and insurance, etc etc.
As a side note, in the US at least there is a reason many advise people to just learn a trade instead of getting a college degree. Trades are in high demand, has been for a good while and probably will be for decades.