If you want to talk about affordability for real, especially where Gen Z is concerned, or if you want to wax psychotic about debt, especially to Gen Z audiences, you have to talk about their real anchor issue, which is student loan debt. To do this, you have to talk about the absolute failure of government manipulation of the higher education market and how our universities didn't just transform ideologically but also sold out generations because of sweet, sweet government-backed monies. I'm actually light on the details of this story but can paint impressionistically. I've read better detailed breakdowns, and so can you. That's my disclaimer here. I'm painting with broad strokes. The biggest important change in this story is that in the 1990s under Bill Clinton's tenure, the federal government decided to underwrite federal student loans in order to try to get a lot more people to go to college. This opened a gigantic can of worms. The direct effect of this policy was that while private lenders would originate the loans, the federal government would assume their risk of losses. Risk of losses is the primary incentive lenders have for not making bad loans, so the federal government stepped in and removed that rather important market incentive. Prior to this, to get a student loan might require you to convince the lender that you were a good bet to repay that loan, that your education was actually a solid investment in your future (economically, not spiritually or whatever). You might have to convince them that you were likely to be a good student and choosing a solid major whose graduates make enough money to pay back the loans if you wanted one. After this, you pretty much just had to fill out the paperwork. YOLO! What, exactly, was in this can of worms? Something like the total destruction of our society in thirty years, or thereabouts. It's actually difficult to know where to start, but the financial situation is probably the easiest one. What actually happened is that a lot more people intended to go to college, and colleges had to (or at least were incentivized to) make expansions to absorb them. That sounds reasonable enough, but it turns out to have been a disaster. Lurking in the background of this problem, by the way, is that by the 1990s, we've already seen a dramatic leftward shift of the university as an institution. There are lots of dumb Leftist majors that amount to anti-Americanism (Critical Theory of a dozen or so stripes, to expand to many more). Faculty that were tipping strongly Left or already captured Leftists (e.g., colleges of education). Absorbing these students required a few things. Some were infrastructure changes: you needed to be able to house them, sit them in classrooms, etc. Others were administrative changes; they needed managing. Some were actually shifts in curriculum emphases: a lot of these kids weren't cut out to major in engineering, pre-med, or even business, and these weird boutique majors (many strongly Leftist activist majors) started to fill up and expand. Remember: no one has to prove to the lender that they're majoring in something with good career prospects anymore to get that money. The tuition rates started to climb massively mostly as a result of the first two changes, and far more infrastructure than administration. As it turns out, the colleges were catering primarily to 17-year-olds who were picking a school and trying to retain upward to maybe 22-year-olds. This is not an age demographic, especially by the later 1990s, that was famously known for choosing colleges based on academic priorities, career priorities, etc. In fact, they mostly select colleges based on anything BUT academics and future employability, especially when the incoming base is expanded to include potentially roughly everyone. They want football, fun, nice dorms, student services, gyms, modernized facilities, etc., and those features became the primary elements by which colleges started to compete with one another for attracting and keeping students. Rather than focusing on having a solid engineering department that produces graduates with high percentages of job placement, administration knew it could attract more of these students (and federally underwritten dollars) by building $20M fitness centers and $50M semi-luxury dorm complexes, even while it couldn't do much to improve the strength of the most solid departments. Besides, most of these kids weren't going to major in the hard stuff anyway. Just as an aside here, a positively post-Boomer cultural current that seems in every respect reasonable and good fed this problem massively, too. That is the belief that "you need to go to college to get a good job," which is the reasonable extension of the climb out of being a largely working-class society into being a largely middle-class (or "bourgeois") society. Nobody works their ass off in a hard factory environment to give their kids the same opportunity. Nobody. Over time, this current at the level of 17-year-olds turned into "college is just the next thing you do after high school," with no clear connection or ambition to make it a genuine, smart career decision for people who are actually cut out for it. It's just the next thing you stumble into and through in an extended adolescence, at least for a sizeable fraction of these people. Many of them stumbled into college into their favored majors, some with an eye on that "good job" they went to college to get, only to find out math is really hard and there's still a college degree at the end of the new Women's Studies department. Others majored in something productive enough but in total ignorance of the actual job market on the other side (I remember a 2010 NPR report about this problem in veterinary medicine, which at the time was producing 11 very debt-saddled graduates for every full-employment job the market could absorb). Colleges did absolutely nothing, for all their increasingly sprawling administrations, to address the realities of career counseling and instead just encouraged the kids to come major in whatever they want as long as they pay tuition and don't drop out. In servicing these natural but ultimately adolescent mismatched priorities of 17-year-olds who had no reason whatsoever at the time to fear an unaffordable future, the colleges and universities actually accrued INSANE amounts of long-term mortgage debt at this time to fund the rapid building of all these new, ultimately "necessary luxury," infrastructure expansions, which locked them into NEEDING, not just wanting, that money. Hundreds of millions of dollars was typical. They were betting the quasi-monopoly money would just keep flowing approximately forever by making these investments. Tuition rose in response, pretty much without any natural control on it because every student could find a federally underwritten loan that provided the lender no risk (but left the student with all the debt). That is, the adults in the room, who would be the government, mortgage lenders, and university upper administrations, took absolutely no action whatsoever that could be regarded as responsible by any real metric. The government collapsed an incentive ecosystem based on some idiotic vision of the Mondialist "experts," and everyone else just followed the broken incentives. Those whackjob Critical majors, meanwhile, rapidly expanded with these new inept students, filling the universities with an activist generation and recruitment system that basically transformed the whole university from the inside out, both at the level of faculty and student. These people need surprisingly high levels of administration and demanded it, in like kind. The transformation of our universities into Woke seminaries is more or less fully on the back of this student loan decision. Tuition costs rose at an average rate of 2-8x inflation because of this government-created bubble which loaded debt onto students who would struggle to carry it for the rest of their lives by removing the incentive to be responsible from the lenders. Textbook companies wanted in on the gravy train and started jacking up the prices of books, which loans also covered. These two sectors are the second and third highest in price increases in the entire economy (after hospital care) since 2000. The really evil part of this, by the way, is that the federal government wasn't creating a taxpayer-funded subsidy, a.k.a. "free money," in the usual sense. It was actually creating something infinitely worse. The students themselves, as is morally right in the narrow sense, would shoulder their own debt, which they'd have unlimited access to because the lenders were absolved of their natural lending risks. The universities pocketed all this money, but they even outspent themselves. So, speaking of the universities going Woke, it gets worse. The corner the universities had painted themselves into while saddling our two youngest adult generations with terrible debt and lying to them about their career prospects to keep the money flowing was so tight that they couldn't afford to lose students. By 2005 or so, this was something like a crisis situation for the universities' budgets, even though tuition had exploded in ways that made people's heads spin. The "better student services" competition to attract and keep students didn't stop: it became even more crucial and reckless (in a way, it reminds me in microcosm of the Great Leap Forward recklessness). Universities started doing anything they could, as my own administrators put it, to "keep students in," "don't lose their scholarships for them with bad grades," and "keep their morale up." That included padding grades, requiring service-level courses to just kind of pass people and turn a mostly blind eye, and, maybe most consequentially, administratively caving in to every histrionic demand from the increasing numbers of inconsolable, insatiable activist lunatics that were filling campus on all three levels: student, faculty, and administration (but here, particularly students backed by the other two). That is, after this point, if third-wave feminists started carrying mattresses around campus to protest "rape culture" after being embarrassed by an awkward drunk hookup the day after the fact, the university had to go DEFCON-2 to fix the problem. The rapid proliferation of DEI offices, and the likes, is more or less directly attributable to this, with all attendant problems. Not being able to afford to lose those 3% of most cantankerous students plus the political-demographic shift of student, faculty, and administration that had already occurred to service all those ridiculous fake (Critical) majors, classes, and programs became a major pressure. The result meant hiring LOTS more administrators to manage this demonic wildfire, which drove up costs, which were passed along through tuition hikes, which were still paid for by these federally underwritten student loans that worked like monopoly money on the one hand while saddling the increasingly unhireable students with completely real debt at the same time. This all spiraled out of control. Bigly. So what did this decision in the 1990s ultimately cause? Hmm... 1) The ENTIRE student debt crisis and the financial injury or crippling of the two youngest adult generations in America; 2) The lurch by universities into a trap of their own making that could only drive up costs and bring this debt problem to a real crisis level; 3) The fundamental transformation of the university from a place of higher learning and liberal arts education into a factory for producing debt-saddled radical socialist and Woke lunatics; 4) Armies of what Peter Turchin would call "elite overproduction," which is to say a flood of (mostly false) societal elites, many of whom are borderline useless as such or worse, who have completely unbalanced our economic system and who are both rightly and completely wrongly very mad about it and destructive of it as a result; 5) The "affordability crisis" of today; 6) The American Cultural Revolution, nothing less. I understand that we're 30 years down river from this decision, and I also understand that most of the decisions we made in the meantime as this problem and crisis manifested before us actually made this problem worse rather than fixing the root cause of it, which had become essentially impossible probably within a decade. See, the universities had become dependent on this money by racking up hundreds of millions in long-term mortgage debt in the initial phases of the gold rush and student-services marketing race, and MANY would likely have bankrupted had we just cut it off, even by, say, 2005 or so. They would be lobbying extremely hard not to be left in this lurch, which they kind of put themselves in but not wholly unreasonably, just imprudently, based on a very foolish decision by the U.S. federal government under very dumb political and cultural assumptions that prevailed in the emerging post-Boomer environment. So now we're kind of stuck with this set of university monstrosities and two badly wrongly injured generations, all of which are engines of nothing short of Cultural Revolution, even without the shocks of Covid, inflation, Democrat-run housing policy mismanagement, and all the rest. There's no clear way to untie this Gordian knot, and simply cutting it, while that might conceivably be best in the long run, would precipitate a crisis beyond comprehension that might, in fact, be fatal. (It's like a Gordian knot in the aorta of our society, frankly.) What should be done isn't clear, but weaning off these errors seems to be the only real choice despite there being almost no political will or mechanism for doing so. Of course, the whole affordability crisis along with the agitation operation known as the Affordability Crisis(TM), are directly downstream of this second-largest and most immediately pertinent problem to the younger generations who are rapidly radicalizing over it, so prospects don't look good here. I don't have an optimistic, encouraging, hopeful, copeful finish to this one. Our universities sold us down the river in more ways than the obvious one, but the cause was dumb federal policy regarding dumb assumptions about the value and necessity of everyone in a post-industrializing world getting a college degree that most of them didn't actually need or benefit from. The conclusion of this story is likely to be a short-to-medium-term absolute catastrophe that if we are smart enough now we can weather by building smart alternatives. The shock is going to hit hard, though. Our mission, which we must accept, is not to let this problem and approaching shock spill over into a successful Cultural Revolution. I'm praying there are smarter people than I am who can come up with better solutions here. One thing is sure: we have got to get back to our American principles of not having the government muck around too much in crucial economic sectors. The market has to be allowed to do its job, or we all pay for the damage.