Would have loved to know that before being pressured by the entire school system around me to pick the high school with the best feeder stats and the highest graduation rate. Before spending literally the last two years of high school mostly just working on getting into college.

Does it not once occur to people who play the incredibly tired libertarian lines that in fact we do live in a society that exerts constant coercion on how we lead our lives? As unhelpful as this rhetorical frame is, taxes aren't the only thing that is being stolen... so is agency.

That's non sequitur. If you open a community pool shortly after a self-flagellation ceremony in your neighborhood and someone proposes all the open wounds is why you're not getting the traffic you expected, the plausibility of the explanation is completely independent of whether or not it was voluntary to participate in the ceremony.

Modern society is pretty much designed to give people with college degrees an advantage. Yes, you can have a good career in the trades but a college degree is the safest bet. Life is much harder without.

but debt is not