It's not minimum wage's fault, it's the government guaranteeing student loans. Tuition skyrocketed since then and has been out of control since.
Then with so many people being told "You have to go to college so you don't become a garbageman!" the requirements for most jobs increased as well. Manufacturing in pharma, for instance, I could take a kid out of middle school and teach him the job in an hour. Get fresh grads from college for a bachelor's degree and they still need an hour of teaching. But now the Bachelors is required for some reason.
Ironically, garbage man pays pretty decent for some minimal manual labor.
Except that's not the case. The GI bill alone (passed in 1944) put millions people through college who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to do so and did so for decades and the price didn't skyrocket. Once deregulation happened the prices began to skyrocket.
Sallie Mae wasn't even a thing until 1973. Literally not boomers LOL. Federal student loans were very uncommon back before the 90s even and applied to only a few different areas, not everything. It is incredibly clear that something happened in the early 2000s that caused the current fiasco, with both tuition and debt skyrocketing.
Huh, interesting. Also interesting is that it leveled off as of late. I know people like to go "muh Reagan" but what happened specifically in the 1980s? As a Republican, I dislike Reagan. I think I'm the only one of my kind.