A generation was promised a simple path to the American dream: Earn a four-year degree, get a good job, buy a house, start a family. For many Millennials, the diploma arrived. The rest of the bargain did not.
Now student loan payments compete with rent, mortgages, and the cost of raising children. Graduates work in jobs that never required the credentials they borrowed money to obtain. Meanwhile, socialism has reached its highest positive rating since Gallup began tracking it in 2010. Who sold Millennials the original promise?
You were lied to by leftist universities that gladly took your money and left you in ruin.
Gallup’s September report found that 43% of Americans viewed socialism positively, up from 39% in 2025. Among adults ages 18 to 34, the figure was 57%. It is an extraordinary development. If government-backed higher education helped saddle a generation with debt, why would more government look like the solution?
The financial burden is real. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported $1.65 trillion in outstanding student loans in the second quarter of 2026. In a separate Federal Reserve survey, 23% of adults with student loans reported recent difficulty making payments. Even a manageable loan bill is money a borrower cannot put toward a down payment or a family.
But why did so many people borrow so much for credentials whose value varies so widely? Because Americans were repeatedly told a four-year degree was the necessary ticket to adulthood.
Parents heard it. Guidance counselors repeated it. Politicians promised greater access. Universities gladly collected the tuition, helped along by a federal lending system that made borrowing easier today and paying the bill a problem for tomorrow.
And some of the professors who taught students to distrust capitalism were only too happy to work within this arrangement. Universities expanded administrative operations while students took on mounting obligations. The people selling degrees should have been the first to explain what those degrees could actually buy.
The gamble persists for younger graduates. Federal Reserve research using 2023 data on graduates ages 22 to 27 found an underemployment rate of 9.7% for nursing majors, compared with 56.5% for liberal arts and 67.2% for criminal justice. Underemployment here means holding a job that typically does not require a college degree. These graduates are working, but many are not using the expensive credential they were told they needed.
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What did the colleges tell their applicants about those odds? If an 18-year-old is asked to borrow tens of thousands of dollars, the institution ought to disclose the likely costs, earnings, and risks. A degree is an investment only if the buyer has a realistic picture of the return. Universities should face the same scrutiny over misleading promises that we expect of any business.
Students also deserved a serious account of the alternatives: trade schools, apprenticeships, community colleges, military service, and employment without a four-year degree. These are legitimate paths to adulthood, not consolation prizes for people supposedly unfit for college.
There is a cultural problem, too. On too many campuses, students are trained to interpret society through oppression, power, and inequality. Let them study those arguments. But also make them confront the best defenses of markets, private property, entrepreneurship, and the limits of government. A university should teach students to examine competing ideas, not recruit them to a fashionable orthodoxy.
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Professors who preach against capitalist exploitation might begin by examining the financial incentives of their own institutions. Some feed students a steady diet of anti-market rhetoric while they borrow heavily for degrees with uncertain returns. That is champagne communism for the faculty and a monthly payment for the graduate.
The irony is hard to miss. A generation taught to question capitalism and burdened by debt from a government-supported lending system may now look to government for relief. But another subsidy does not require universities to tell the truth about what they sell. Nor does it hold anyone accountable for promises that proved empty.
Accountability begins with honest disclosures in university advertising and recruitment. I am working on that problem through the Intellectual Nutrition Label project. If a school makes demonstrably deceptive promises, lawyers and class-action lawsuits may have a role. Institutions that charge families so much should not be exempt from answering for what they represent.
The lesson for Millennials is all too clear. You were lied to by leftist universities that gladly took your money and left you in ruin. It isn’t too late to see the leftist worldview for what it is: the road to serfdom. It’s time to hold the universities that pushed these lies accountable.