> The vast majority of 18 year olds know nothing, they've seen none of the world, and can only rely on the little knowledge they've acquired up to that point in their life.

Which is why IMO, we should stop pushing 18 year olds into college. Let them work a full-time job somewhere and live outside of their parents' place for a few years go get a feel for the real world.

> society's advice has been it's "go to college, a college degree means you'll make so much more money and even at the cost of $200k in debt will be worth it"

Society sucks and definitely needs to stop saying that kind of BS.

> It's one thing to say "capitalism is how things fall naturally." It's another to say "this is perfect and how it should work and nothing's broken, everyone gets their just desserts, capitalism is the only way, move along." I'm not saying that this is actually what you're trying to convey, but the anecdote you inserted here definitely rings of this (common) sentiment.

I have a friend that's constantly sharing stuff from /r/LateStageCapitalism and it makes me roll my eyes.

IMO, Capitalism is a necessary evil to encourage innovation and reward hard work. The problem is that it also leads to abuse of workers, blaming the poor for being poor, worship of money, idolization of the rich, and most annoyingly, the idea that everyone that is rich is rich because they worked hard, and not because they inherited wealth. At the very least, people frequently don't acknowledge that many wealthy CEOs that built their company from their garage still started wealthy and had access to the funding to get an Ivy League education plus their own money to kickstart their company. Bill Gates's dad was a lawyer, his mom served on the board of directors at a bank, and he went to a private school as a child and then to Harvard. To say he pulled himself up by his bootstraps would be highly misleading. Trump even said he got a loan from his father for $1mill to start his businesses, and some of his followers STILL think he's a self-made man. But I've digressed...

The TL;DR is that capitalism sucks, but it sucks less than the alternatives.

> talk to a few people who are the first to get college degrees in their family.

That would be myself.

I like to think I can truly call myself self-made. I moved out of my parent's place when I was 21 with mostly nothing but a full-time job in retail. I paid for my rent, my apartment deposit, all my furniture/appliances, and my PC. My parents gave me nothing. I had been a huge slacker in high school and didn't even have my diploma. When I was 27 (2009), I decided I was done working a low-wage job, got my GED, and started going to college. 4 1/2 years later, spring of 2014, I had a Bachelor's in Computer Science and $43,000 in student loan debt. I got a job as a software engineer a few weeks after graduation, and about two years ago, moved to a job in application security. I own a house, a respectable car, and I take nice vacations. I'm the quintessential middle class now.

Other than a couple thousand dollars in Pell grants and my student loans over the course of the time I was in college, I have never received financial assistance from anyone. I've never been on SNAP/food stamps/etc.

And yet I try to have empathy for those that are in such dire straights that pulling themselves out is next to impossible. I recognize that the apartment I lived in when I first started going to college in 2009 was $650/month, but is now $950/month, while wages haven't kept up. I recognize that many retail and fast food businesses often avoid hiring people full-time, so the poor end up needing to work two jobs with unpredictable hours to pay the bills. I could go on.

> The gap is widening between rich and poor, straight-up capitalism exacerbates those effects, and I don't think it's easy to argue that's a good thing.

I absolutely agree 100%. The gap is widening and it's a terrible thing. But I feel that some millennials are using it as a scapegoat when they made their own bad choices, like going to an out-of-state university for an art degree.