It's cultural and personal

If you're a parent, you probably are long enough out of college that you don't know what most new juniors are getting out of fresh from college. There's very few to no ways to pay your way through university with no debt, these days. Cheap in-state tuition & fees is over 5,000 per semester, not including books, equipment, travel, housing, food, healthcare... When I was still in college, most kids were graduating with debt. Tuition and fees have only gone up since I left. Lots of people I knew who dropped out to try and save for college ended up in dead-end despair jobs.

You saw the part about my spending my entire career from 1996-2020 doing your bog standard enterprise dev? In 1996, I graduated from an unknown state college in South Georgia and I made $11/hour as a computer operator working on DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes. Because of…poor career choices …I didn’t hit six figures until I was 40. Even now I make about what a software engineer II makes at my same BigTech company at 49 in cloud consulting. As I say, please play the worlds smallest fiddle for me. Last year, my wife and I got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in 3 suitcases - including our cars - and bought a vacation/investment property in a resort area in Florida. We stay here half the year from October - mid March and we fly around the US the other half of the year “digital nomadding”. My wife in the meantime is retired at 47 and she is involved with her passion in the fi…

If you paid your way through uni with no debt you most likely didn't graduate recently, which makes your advice to current students (or ones that have recently graduated) not very well aligned with reality.