The Stockholm Syndrome of College Affordability

I took out and paid off my student loans from Emerson College with some degree of financial sacrifice during the mid 2000's (while making a videogame on nights and weekends, whatever that was about).

Referencing this graph, I graduated at basically the last time college was affordable for a middle class family.  I could almost hear the door of college affordability shutting behind me, even if I didn't understand why or its long-term macroeconomic implications.

And now that candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are proposing tuition free college and even some student loan forgiveness programs, my reflexive response is not to feel cheated for paying my loans off, not recoiling from "a slap in the face" for paying off my student loans ahead of schedule, and not some misplaced desire to inflict upon others a perhaps unnecessary educational expense I incurred... but rather with the hopes that access and affordability for higher education improves with the next generation rather than receding from it.

We should resist this Stockholm Syndrome mentality about broken systems from which we convince ourselves subsequent generations must endure merely because we ourselves persevered through them... or worse: cede the argument to older generations (like Boomers) who often struggle to relate at all with just how strenuous college affordability is for Gen Z today.  We can fight for a better future together, because it is the best shared outcome for our society, irrespective of what dues we each had to pay to get this far.