u/Leonine94

College was once sold as a ticket to the American dream. But students today are taking a tougher look at the college tradeoff: burdensome debt and no guarantee of a dream career — or employment at all, as AI threatens the jobs the degrees were meant to unlock.

"People didn't ask whether college mattered 20 years ago," says Courtney Brown, the vice president of impact and planning at Lumina Foundation. Now, "they're asking: Are today's students going to be prepared for tomorrow's jobs? Is it really helping them out?"

But there's a college confidence paradox: Even as Americans sour on higher education, they keep sending their kids to campus.

"There is still massive pressure on them from their high schools, the educators at their schools, their parents, their peers, and just the broader culture to still go to college," says The Up & Up founder and Gen Z researcher Rachel Janfaza.

Implementing a universal, single-payer health care system would save the U.S. more than $1 trillion and some 114,000 lives every year, according to a recent Yale University analysis.

In a preprint paper posted on July 24 that has not yet been peer-reviewed—the gold-standard quality check for academic research—scientists at Yale’s School of Public Health and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, found that, under the current U.S. health care system, which largely hinges on private insurance, Americans spend some $5.2 trillion per year on health care. Under a “Medicare for All” system, they estimated, that would shrink to around $4.2 trillion, with savings of $1.04 trillion.

As defined by the researchers, Medicare for All would expand the current Medicare system, which currently provides health insurance to Americans aged 65 and older, to the entire population. It’s a popular policy point on the political left, and the study has already been picked up by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a staunch universal health care proponent.

“This study confirms what we have known for years: Medicare for All saves lives and saves money. In fact, guaranteeing healthcare as a human right through a Medicare for All, single-payer system would cost $1 trillion less than our current dysfunctional system. It would save working families thousands of dollars a year. And it would prevent over 100,000 Americans from dying unnecessarily each and every year because they cannot make it to a doctor in time,” Senator Sanders said. “At a time when 15 million Americans are being thrown off the healthcare they have and 20 million Americans have already seen their premiums double, on average, as a result of Trump’s so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ we need Medicare for All now more than ever. The time is now to end the greed of the big insurance and drug companies and pass Medicare for All.”