I feel strongly that it is generally even more risky nowadays to be in a two-person fixed relationship before you have achieved some sort of stability. A single person can couch surf/live in their car/effectively be homeless and still get back on their feet. It has taken me til 30 to feel like I had gotten to a place where if my partner took a fall at work I could cover both parties modest expenses among student loans and other debt, even though I am not holding any extraneousness debt aside from student loans.
A pooled income of two working and healthy people is still insufficient to mitigate enough risk before they can weather multiple setbacks and still pay student loans and start to form a family. What is the median income? $53,891 (http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/20/news/economy/median-income/)? Even ballpark estimates makes me feel just as safe trying to make do with half that than with that.
People sharing the same living space are counted as in the same household and more people tend to live in the same household when things go bad.
Much lower is personal income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
If you did go to university, it was easy to pay for and generally not too hard to graduate in 4 years. A bachelor's degree was valuable. Today, good luck graduating in 4 years. Not to mention, a bachelor's degree is worth far less, graduate degrees or dual degrees are the thing now.
By the time you go through university (5-8 years), work your (probably unpaid) internship, and get a job that gives you so much as a hope of a decent, middle class life, you're probably 25-28 years old. And unless you found your future spouse in university, then there's at least a year of dating, a year or two of engagement (since wedding venues are damn near impossible to find), and you're getting married at 30+.
Anyhow of course that's above the average, plenty get married young, but then again, plenty are poor too. Poor people can get married younger by skipping the whole university thing, but then that does diminish their income potential for their lives. This is what I did, then went to university. Now I'm still 30+, albeit married, but no kids yet.
Anyhow, the point is, marriage generally comes as a result of financial stability, not the other way around, though you're right that it does reduce expenses, if both spouses work. But because of cultural constructs, stability needs to exist before people couple up.
3 year university degrees exist, but only in general studies or a few very soft subjects.
The 'typical' degree which is called a 4-year degree, means you need to take the maximum course load every semester for 4 years. With scheduling, workloads, internships, etc..., it's very rare for anyone to complete it in 4 years in most fields (engineering, business, most sciences, etc...) these days. It's possible, but the vast majority take longer. If you change majors even once, good luck.
Anyhow, not sure exactly how the system works in the US. Maybe the system is efficient enough that graduating in 4 years is still a possibility? Maybe less people work because the cost is so high, whereas in Canada more students have jobs?
With the catastrophic cost of a university education, people really have no choice but to take on debt to get a degree - even if you were working full-time, year-round, the wages you'd get as a high school graduate in some shit job don't even cover state-school tuition, let alone a private college, not to mention books, food, a place to live, etc. My dad made about $5k working over the summer in the 70s when he was in college, and I also made about $5k working when I could when I was in college in the 2000s. The difference is, that paid his whole year of school and living expenses, rather than half of one semester of tuition.
* Changing majors
* Transferring from a community college to a university
* Failing or withdrawing from courses, especially ones not offered every semester
* Trying to balance coursework with a work schedule or childcare
Can all delay you a year or two, perhaps more in combination. I observed a complete paradigm shift between:
* The students who went straight from high school and into college; Lived in dorms, high representation in humanities programs, who were showing up to the 13th/14th grade with no real responsibilities and enough money to do as they like & find a thing they were interested in. They had a wide variety of grades (many failed, some did very well), but usually a relaxed attitude about risks and leisure time.
* The commuters, "nontraditional" students, & community college students/transfers, for whom many of the above were frequently true, and who were usually career-oriented. They tended to struggle for the B grade.
* The STEM upperclassmen & grad students, who had successfully defeated or overcome these hazards by becoming workaholics who dropped everything else in their life to finish in 4 years with high marks & internships. They rarely retained any social life, and were often academia-oriented.
And then there is the fact that in a lot of cases it is mandatory. My mom has been a secretary most of her adult life. Then she became a parelegal because of her overwhelming experience. It has become increasingly hard for her to change jobs as a Middle aged woman because most firms won't even look at someone without a bachelor job for a secretary position. Much less the better paying parelegal job she's become accustomed to. A 20 year old kid just trying to get that entry level position now has to compete not only with people like my mom with more years experience than he's been alive, but also with degree holding individuals.
A degree is the new high school diploma. It's game theory really. If no one has a degree, it's super valuable, so whoever gets one will have a huge advantage. So everyone gets one because it's the best individual decision. Today, since everyone has one, if you're one of the few that don't, you're at a massive disadvantage. So you still get one for fear of being left behind, even if the relative worth is far less.
Tech (rather programming) is kind of an exception because it's easier to show what you're capable of, which allows you to bypass the requirement. There are plenty of trades and 'artistic' fields which allow for this as well. But for most fields, a degree is a sort of 'guarantee' of a minimum level of knowledge, dedication and even financial means. There's no Github for business people.
Is that the sound of opportunity knocking?
The question isn't who you work with now, it's what your HR department puts on new job postings. Do they say degree required?
If older millenials made the argument to any parent/teacher/elder that college was an expensive boondoggle, the response would be something along the lines of "you will wind up dead or in jail".
And if one had a strong enough self-confidence to not buy the prophesies of manacled destitution, there was the social side of the con to catch them.
The social and hedonistic enticements. That longed for bacchanal known as the college experience, was always higher eds backup plan to lure younglings like the pied piper of hamelin into insurmountable debt.
That's why they spend so much turning colleges into country clubs for the youth. There is no legitimate reason pure education needs to cost so much.
Like the elves, dwarves and humans of middle earth, so we were, all of us, deceived.
All that said. I loved college, it just did nothing for me economically. After I graduated and it was 2009, I would have rather had all the tuition money as seed cash for bootstrapping a career.
You don't go to stanford over a local liberal arts school because you'll get a massively superior education at Stanford - you go to Stanford so you can get to know other Stanford students who are more likely to be wealthy and connected.
My dad went to stardford in the 70's, and he said when LaTex didn't have the physics symbol hbar, he just went over to Don Knuth's office and said hey dude, put an Hbar into this thing so physicists can use it.
You won't get that kind of access as a local liberal arts or community college, and that kind of social access is worth far more than stuff you can learn for free on the internet.
People deep in debt don't usually attract a lot of mates.