I'm not entirely victim blaming, but the idea of "go to college and you'll be fine no matter what" hasn't been true for 20 years. People using that myth to justify complaining that they can't find a job or they are underemployed with a degree from a middling university in a silly major. Some of that definitely falls to parents for buying into it, but it wasn't a prevailing theme even recently.
I graduated HS in 2003 and even then my parents and my friends parents were very much of the mentality of "we'll help you with school, but make sure its a degree with value." Hell, I was a Psych major (eventually double major) and I had to work out what I planned to do with it for my dad and my grandfather (one for college help, the other for avoiding stern lectures about my future). I got into a good school so I was fortunate, but my neighbor who was a year younger ended up going to CC for 2 years and transferring to Marquette (instead of going 4 years at a lower level school), not in small part to discussions his father and my father had.
I'm firmly a millennial and I have siblings aged across the next decade into the zoomers, so I have a broad scope of viewpoints and experiences of the age range. I don't disagree with some of the points, what I do disagree with is supposedly smart people (both parents and children) who employed little to no critical thinking and now perpetually complain about the system. For everyone first generation college grad with a ton of debt who is underemployed (who has truly been screwed and I feel for) you have another one or two 20 somethings who graduated with a 3.0 from a mid level university with a marketing degree and expect a very well paying job because they have a degree.
This feels very anecdotal, so allow me some anecdotes of my own!
I was four years after you and while my dad was a first generation college student, my mom's family had gone to college for at least the previous four generations. I don't know if I would say my parents were "go to college and you'll be fine no matter what" believers, but what I do know was that I was told not going to college was not an option for me. I mean that literally, there was a time I expressed interest in going a different route and I was told I would be going to college whether I liked it or not. It was the right choice for me, but there were no conversations for me about finding a degree with value. I was told we will pay for half your college, you will pay for the other half, the rest is up to you to figure out. Ultimately I did figure it out. I struggled for many years post-graduation but I managed to stay above water until a couple of years ago when my career finally took off and am now comfortable. It was a weird path, I spent a lot of years working jobs under $40K a year but living in employee housing to offset the lack of salary, and it worked out.
My wife was two years after me. She's the daughter of a librarian and a failed janitor. Her mom was first generation college student, no one in her dad's family had ever gone to college. She didn't have the test scores to go to an elite university but was considering SUNY level schools. Her parents pushed her to attend a local private school (IIRC you know the one, I think we discovered our wives were alumni of the same school) because in their mind "private was better". As a 17 year old my wife was the one questioning, "this is a lot of money, should I go to a community college first" but the consistent refrain she heard from her parents was that the debt didn't matter because as long as she graduated, she would end up with a high paying job. To make matters worse, her parents tell her that they will take out Parent Plus loans but she will be responsible for paying them back afterward (these are of course scaled to income of a librarian with 35+ years of experience, not the income of a recent college grad who hasn't gotten a job yet). So she goes and gets a psych degree from an undergrad institution that is more expensive than Marquette but no one outside of Long Island has ever heard of. She leaves with six figures in debt, needing to make two separate payments a month (one for her direct loans, one paying back her parents for their loan) and no job prospects that could remotely accommodate that. Now, she too made it work. She put the debt in deferment by getting a master's degree and then doctoral degree from a much more prestigious university in a much more valuable field and now makes enough to handle those payments and the rest of life.
My six cousins (from two sets of aunts/uncles) range from being four years behind me to eleven years behind me. None of their parents went to college but all were insistent that their kids go to college. They all cited the belief that it was the only way for them to have a better life. The first four of them all go to different colleges (various mid-size publics in Michigan) and none of them make it past their sophomore year. All of them either fail out or drop out. The fifth one makes it through graduation and finds zero job prospects. The sixth one opted to join the army instead (and is thriving). The five who went to college all end up various trades and while one is still finding his way the other four are extremely happy. But if you talk to them, they bemoan the lost years of earning they could have had if they went straight into their trades.
In general, I think we overestimate how "supposedly smart" people are at 17/18 when they have to make these decisions. We're asking children to take on tens of thousands in debt with no required conversations about the ramifications or their future earning potential. Ideally, they have a parent or guardian who is savvy enough to have the conversations that it sounds like your family had with you, but I think more often than not, the parent involved is either unwilling to or incapable of having those kinds of conversations effectively. I think most high schools could benefit from requiring additional classes on financial literacy. I don't know what others experiences were but I had one class my junior year on economics. We learned how to balance a checkbook (I haven't balanced a checkbook since), were given pretend money to invest in pretend stocks (this was actually useful), and had to make a fake business plan for a made up business (could have been useful but I remember just making up numbers and no one calling me on it).
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