I agree with almost everything you've said, to be honest. Blair's push to get everyone into uni without considering what degree inflation would do to the job market in its wake was brutally ill thought out - it paralleled similar policies being enacted across the English-speaking Western world though, because everyone saw uni as the magical panacea that would drag everyone into the middle class and leave no one behind in this new, post-Cold War world.
Today, we are still dealing with the societal consequences of that movement - an entire, 250-million strong generation of kids told all their lives that going to uni was the *number one* thing to do, that anything else was a failure, and that uni would be the ticket to the prosperity and that investing 5+ years of their lives in a degree, *any* degree, would leave them the winners in our new societies. And now, finally, being told that they were wrong to believe their parents, their teachers, their peers, and nearly *every* authority figure in their lives - that they're lazy and entitled for spending four to five years doing what they were explicitly *told* to do, and being sneered at for not realizing that a uni degree today is the new school diploma. I.e, you have to have one to get anywhere, but that's largely it. A generation more highly educated than any other in history is scraping by working minimum wage jobs, living with their parents and carrying around student debt that many of them will take decades to repay, if ever. And, for the first time, they're being told that it's their fault for believing their elders.
I agree with your assessments of the situation, and of your views on parents who brought their kids up a certain way and then complain about them later on. I also agree with your views on pensioners, in that they still need societal support, and that they're really not to blame for the way society turned out either - they're not living some high life because they nefariously planned it that way just to spite the kids, and in many cases they are definitely still living in pretty bad conditions scraping by on the assistance they get.
I agree with you on most of what you said. Just about the only place I disagree with you is in your initial assessment about the millennial generation, that's all. You called them people who stayed in uni until their mid-20s and lived with their parents while bleating about how unfair the world was, *as if* that was a conscious choice they made in the face of evidence to the contrary. Truth is, they were told all their lives that anything other than uni was implicitly admitting that they were failures, or not good enough to be white-collar - by their parents, by their teachers and by society at large. And now that they followed all the instructions, obediently educated themselves and spent years of their early adult lives coping with the financial crisis and its aftermath...they're being dumped on by people for pointing out how unfair it is to blame them for things they had no hand in, and for pointing out that even the benefits that pensioners receive *now* are things that they themselves are unlikely to get when they reach the same age.
The millennials are going to grow up and grow old in a world where we will, on the whole, be *worse* off than our forebears in all sorts of ways. Society has failed us as a generation (not as individuals, but as a generation) in that respect - the promise of constant, uninterrupted growth has failed this generation of people. The consequences of that will be *dire* in the coming decades, and I don't think people quite understand how serious the breaking of that compact that has held post-war Western society together will be. But what's galling on top of that fact is that millennials are being blamed for having it worse than our predecessors - as if it's somehow our fault that society failed us as a whole. That's all that I disagree with you on - if you look deep enough into it, we never had a choice. And I say this as someone who undeservedly won the lottery in terms of this generation - got an undergrad and a Master's degree from Canada's largest university, and found a comfortable, if not spectacular position a few months after graduating, which I've largely stayed in to this day.
My circumstances are not those of my generation, which on the whole wasn't as lucky as I was. And my generation don't deserve to be pilloried for doing *as they were goddamn told*.
