My father in the 90s was able to afford a SAHM with two children and a car on the salary of a low-level police officer, and by the time he was 30, to buy a large 3BR+kitchen+living room flat in Munich.
I'm as old as he was back when he bought that, and I have absolutely zero in savings, with the combined income of my s/o and me barely keeping up with rent and cost of living despite earning above average in an IT job. I couldn't afford to have a car but thankfully don't need it as public transport in Munich is actually worth the name. No, moving out of Munich is not really an option, as house prices and rents have exploded just the same in the entire area and rural areas are, as I described, absolutely left to rot in terms of infrastructure.
The world back then may indeed have not been as rosy as many of my generation paint it - but it sure was objectively better than today. Our only hope is that we can inherit something from our parents, assuming that there is something left over after elderly care will have robbed them of all their savings and assets.
And even academic degrees per se outside of academic careers aren't a guarantee for higher paying jobs any more, not since large companies started to use having an academic degree as a proxy to legally discriminate against wide swaths of the population, including normally protected classes: it's hard to get academic degrees with a variety of mental health disorders, and many people from socioeconomically disadvantaged castes (immigrants, poor people, people of color) get filtered out by the educational system way before they can even enter university.
So why should one go for an academic degree or otherwise put in unhealthy amounts of effort if you finish at 25-30 and still only get exploitative, underpaid labor? The entire "social contract" framework underpinning our societies is broken at a fundamental level and I don't see the political will to fix any of that unless the boomers are removed from society's high positions.