Here's a hell of a book.

Here are the pain-in-the-ass facts:

1) A college education costs more than it ever did.

2) The returns on that college education are less than they've ever been.

3) The lifetime wage gap between high school diplomas and college degrees is greater than it's ever been.

So: You're fucked if you go to college. But you're more fucked if you don't go to college. And your parents don't even understand the magnitude of your fuckedness.

The book was a good read: it illustrated that every college is stampeding towards online education but none of them are willing to pass along the savings to their students because they're all mortgaged up to their eyeballs. It pointed out that three different nonprofit mammoths are establishing universal education standards such that if you test out of English 101, you test out of English 101 everywhere. And it made a convincing point that the middle can't hold, the entire system is going to shift and the future of higher ed is bright but there's a bloodbath coming before we get there.

It's a shitty time to be a recent college grad. It's going to be a less shitty time for their kids. Millenials will have the last laugh; here's the 'boomers slagging on Generation X shortly before they created The Internet.

Doesn't help in the moment, but all these people griping about what cheap pricks the millenials are have a future filled with cat food and sawdust ahead of 'em.