Life experience matters. If you’re living at home with your parents and you’ve never had to pay a bill, then you’re only point of contact with the real world is the conservative writers you read, whose perspectives you swallow uncritically because you lack any other point of reference.

This is a Boomer talking point: “Why do you go to college millennial libtard? Just learn a trade like I did 40 years ago.” No one in my or your generation who has actually experienced the real world in a meaningful way would be making this case. All the old trades that my dad’s and grandfather’s generation made a middle class living off are dying. The fact that you think welders make six-figure salaries is, in and of itself, a sign of how clueless you are about how things work in reality.

I graduated with 40k in debt despite working a series of part-time jobs to pay my way. I couldn’t take the unpaid internships that are a prerequisite for success in journalism and in most skilled fields that people my age want to work in. I paid my debt in 10 years, and when you factor in interest that’s 60k at least. I could have a paid one-quarter of a moderate home, the primary store of wealth in our society.

You can quote German matriculation data and parrot some specious interpretation of it that you copied verbatim from a phrenology journal like Quillette, but it doesn’t reflect the actual reality millions of us are living.

Maybe we should have greater vocational training but that’s not mutually exclusive with tuition free universities, nor is it really an argument against it.

The most valuable lesson I learned in college cake from my sociology professor, who told me “you’re not as smart as you think you are.”

It’s something a smug “autodidact” such as yourself could stand to learn.